Michelle Smith Doesn’t Walk Her Talk on Taxes

[photo from D202 board meeting]

Michelle Smith, candidate for state senate in the 49th district, has voted every year that she’s been on the D202 School Board in support of increased taxes.

She’s done this both by voting for increases and—when she didn’t show up twice to vote on the tax levy directly—by voting to approve the dollars needed estimates leading to the tax increase vote (i.e., she saw it coming) and voting to approve every budget during her tenure which included increased taxes.

Smith's surrogate in a (lame) television ad says that “taxes are crushing us” and that Smith is the “problem solver” we need to make it stop. That doesn’t square with the fact that Smith voted to raise our school district taxes by about 28% during her seven years on the board, adding a little over $1,000 to the average homeowner’s tax bill. Michelle Smith voted for increases five years straight and NEVER voted against a tax increase or the budgets based on one. These tax increases have been occurring as the district is also borrowing against future tax income—taxes to be collect in future years—to cover the bills. That’s not smart fiscal policy or practice.

Debt is a parallel problem to revenue. While Michelle Smith has been on the D202 board, the district's debt has ballooned to more than $260 million. That’s more than the district's annual budget and it puts the per resident debt burden for D202 equal to that of a resident in the Chicago Public School system. Instead of working to cut the deficit in any effective way, Smith figured it was best to let it ride and instead voted to make homeowners pay increased property taxes to cover just the interest on the debt.

All of this is confirmed through media reports, financial reports from reputable sources like Moody’s (see their Investor Service Preliminary Official Statement of January 2016), and school board documents.

I get that it is not always easy to be in elected office. It’s constant and hard work to achieve the right balance of taxation and spending that does the best things for us all together, as equal Americans under law and governance. That’s why voting for the right people to do the job is so important. That’s why it stinks when candidates talk only in platitudes and partisan cliches.

Michelle Smith doesn’t say much of substance, mostly repeating that she’s not a politician as usual and that she’s something new and improved for us all to send to Springfield. The reality is that Michelle Smith has a record in public office of increasing taxes (while hurting education) and she’s played politics plenty and for a long time. Understandable—but not acceptable—that she doesn’t want to run on that. This is why Smith doesn’t mention at all her time on the school board in her recent television ad or in her campaign flyers. She’d obviously prefer we don’t consider what she’s done juxtaposed with what she says.