Testimony on the Proposed

COOK COUNTY TAX INCREASES

Cook County Board of Commissioners

Committee on Finance

Nov. 6, 2007

Tom Rivera, President

Northern Illinois Business Advocacy Coalition

On behalf of the more than 5,000 business members of the Northern Illinois Business Advocacy Coalition, I urge the Finance Committee to reject the proposed increases in   the County’s existing Sales and restaurant taxes, and proposed new use taxes for, among others, Telecommunications, Electricity, and Heating Gas.

The Northern Illinois business Advocacy Coalition represents 12 Chambers of Commerce in the Northwest Suburban Corridor of Chicago, among them Arlington Heights, Barrington, Buffalo Grove, Des Plaines, Hoffman Estates, Mount Prospect, Rolling Meadows, Wheeling/Prospect Heights, and the Greater O’Hare and Schaumburg Business associations.

Through the course of these hearings, you have received testimony from many members of the Cook County business community, testimony that tells you the proposed Cook County increases and new user taxes being contemplated will bring us to the highest levels in the country, a level at which business cannot survive.

And that is before tax increases proposed for the City and for the RTA are factored in, and on top of increases in the state minimum wage, rising healthcare and insurance costs, and a classification system that is increasing even further the property tax burden paid by Cook County businesses. 

Business in your County now is facing hard decisions, decisions that include layoffs, cutbacks in development, and for some businesses, moving out of the area as the only option to survival.

In the Northwest Suburbs of Cook County, we really are on the front lines of this daily battle because we are surrounded by counties with lower tax rates today, without even  the consideration of raising tax rates tomorrow.

The biggest issue, of course, is the proposed Sales Tax increase, although all of the other proposed tax increases and new user taxes also affect the bottom line.

We in the Northwest Suburbs have a huge retail industry, which not only has state and county taxes in existence, but also has local taxes, which in many cases are the bread and butter of individual local government budgets.

And all we have to do is look across the County lines to DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry Counties to see the new retail centers going up, all of which offer their  customers sales tax rates that already are lower than ours by at least 1% if not more.

Jump that to a 3% difference and you will drive your own citizens out of their county to shop elsewhere.

While you may realize a small gain with such actions today, you will have destroyed the business base that exists in Cook County, and, certainly, any chance to grow in the future.

We realize that times are difficult, but we ask you to address the issues, as hard as the choices are, of employee health benefits, the pension benefit system, and the Cook  County Bureau of Health in order to resolve the structural deficit that has caused these problems.

So many of our Northwest Suburban businesses have made and continue to make the hard choices to survive and prosper and we believe the County is well positioned at this time to do the same. We need a strong Cook County government and Cook County government needs a strong business community.

Raising taxes will weaken our NIBAC businesses, make them less competitive to businesses in neighboring counties, and hurt Cook Country government in the long run.  We urge you to approve a 2008 budget that does not add to the tax burden of business and the residents of Cook County.

With Thanks for Your attention to this matter.

THE CHAMBERS AND BUSINESS ASSOCIATIONS OF NIBAC