First a definition.
PILOT means payment in lieu of taxes.
In an op-ed piece in today’s Chicago Tribune by Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. there are a couple of paragraphs that put the threat to homeowners in a nut shell:
“If you or I upgrade our curb appeal, create an addition or build a mother-in-law suite to our homes, the county assesses the new value, and we get hit with a higher tax bill the next year. But if you or I have the benefit of building a stadium or an Amazon warehouse [or Prairie Grove’s lithium battery farm], the megaprojects bill would let us skip any tax increase for the next generation, up to 40 years.
“Proponents say it would incentivize development, but what it would do is rob schools and services of revenue and shift the responsibility of paying for local public institutions from big corporations to everyday homeowners.”
