By Bob Seidenberg
rseiden914@gmail.com
With little discussion Monday, Evanston City Council members voted to override Mayor Daniel Biss’s earlier veto of a local grocery tax, narrowly meeting the state’s Oct. 1 deadline for communities to make such a move to replace a recently repealed 1% state grocery tax.
Councilmember Jonathan Nieuwsma (4th Ward) made the motion to override the mayor’s veto, assuring that the city will be able to replace the expiring state grocery tax with one of its own.
The tax generates roughly $2.5 million annually for the city with a difficult budget season approaching. The council voted 8-0 to adopt it, easily mustering the two-thirds majority, or six votes, needed to override the mayor’s veto. Councilmember Parielle Davis (7th) was not present for the vote.
Mayor: Tax would ‘deepen economic pain’
The mayor carried through on a pledge to veto the tax, announcing in a Sept. 17 message to community members that he was returning the ordinance to the council, urging them to find another solution to replacing the lost revenue.
“With food prices already at historic highs, adding an additional tax on groceries would not only deepen the economic pain for local families, it would be fundamentally unfair,” he argued.
The mayor, who is running to represent Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, also highlighted his decision a day after in an email to potential campaign contributors, noting that “my job as mayor is to make things more affordable for residents, not less.”
“People tell me everywhere I go that they’re being squeezed by higher rent, rising energy bills, childcare that eats up paychecks, and a cost-of-living crisis that seems to be getting worse by the day,” he wrote.
In a brief discussion on Monday, councilmembers held to their plans, however, to pass a local tax in place of the state one.
“This is not a new tax,” Nieuwsma pointed out. “This tax has been in place for a number of years. Less than half of this tax is borne by Evanston residents.”
Furthermore, he said, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients are not subject to the tax, he said. And “many, if not most, of our peer communities are doing this.”
To top that off, Nieuwsma said he conducted “a non-scientific poll” of residents in his own central Evanston ward, with more than two-thirds of them supporting the tax.
Councilmember Matt Rodgers (8th Ward), speaking after Nieuwsma, said he had initially expressed interest in a home rule sales tax increase to make up the revenue lost from the expiring state tax.
But with that tax facing the same Oct. 1 deadline as the grocery tax for communities to act, “that time has come and gone,” he said. “I do not think moving this to the property tax bill is the most appropriate place for it to be, and I feel that we’ve kind of been backed into this timeline and are kind of being forced to take a vote that some of us find unpalatable, but is the best solution that we have.”