June 25, 2018 (posted by Ben Joravsky)
By Ryan Smith
...The amount you pay in property taxes (click here) is partly determined by the value of your property as assessed by Cook County assessor Joe Berrios. If you think Berrios has overassessed your property, you can appeal his assessment. If he—or the Cook County Board of Review—lowers your assessment, you'll pay less in property taxes. Over the last few years, Trump has successfully appealed several times, hiring 14th Ward alderman Ed Burke as his attorney. In addition to being chairman of the City Council's finance committee and one of Mayor Rahm's closest allies, Burke somehow finds the time to run a property tax appeal business....
Trump practices tax avoidance. But, he doesn't practice tax avoidance as a method of process, he seeks out the avenue of corruption that will guarantee him tax avoidance. Ed Burke is an attorney that needs to be reviewed by his peers. He practices conflict of interest, not tax avoidance. His applications for tax relief for his clients need to be audited to be sure they received legitimate tax reductions.
Ed Burke should not be re-elected 14th Ward Alderman. He is corrupting the tax system in Chicago.
Considering the tax avoidance by Trump, the Chicago tower needs to be reassessed and for back taxes as well. The process Ed Burke employed was corrupt because of conflict of interest.
...So, in effect, Trump has depended on the kindness of powerful Democratic bosses to cut his property taxes even as he bashes the Democrats and tries to eradicate everything they believe in.
Burke recently dropped Trump as a client—in part because he's worried the connection will cost him votes as he runs for reelection next year in a mostly Latino ward. But the damage has already been done. Thanks to Burke, Trump has saved roughly $14 million in property taxes since 2010, according to a Sun-Times exposé.
What's worse, the less Trump pays in property taxes, the more the rest of us have to pay. I don't know exactly how much more we have to pay to compensate for the $14 million in breaks that Burke helped Trump win. But it makes my blood boil just thinking about all of this....
Does Trump go out of his way to build towers no one else would? Does he think bankruptcy is a business model? Does he build these towers so he doesn't have to pay rent or purchase a home? The White House, other than the house he grew up in, is probably the first place he lived with a lawn to mow.
March 27, 2019
By Alex Nitkin and Joe Ward
About a year before the 2005 groundbreaking (click here) for Trump International Hotel & Tower, Trump Organization executive Charles Reiss met the late Chicago real estate broker Bruce Kaplan and his colleague, Leslie Karr. The Trump family, Reiss said, wanted advice on how to market the retail space that would face the Chicago River at the tower’s base.
“The way it’s designed now, it’s never going to lease up,” Karr recalls telling Reiss. The roughly 70,000-square-foot deck’s 10-foot ceilings, undulating facade and sunken location would be too awkward to attract customers, she said.
Just reaching the space requires detailed directions. At the north end of the Wabash Avenue bridge, a tiled stairway dips down from the sidewalk and beyond the sight of passing pedestrians. Once you reach the bottom, the path gives way to a row of metallic columns rising like Sequoia trees five stories up to the hotel lobby, interrupting an otherwise unobstructed view of the river....
I am quite confident Scott Pruitt's time at the EPA served Trump well. The City of Chicago and the State of Illinois need to assess Trump's Chicago tower for compliance with water quality standards.
There is no excuse for this. It effects the environment of the river and can create algae growth. The conservation clubs should be up in arms no matter where a Trump tower exists, even by name only, if the property is in violation of environmental laws.
Water quality needs to be a national agenda.
August 15, 2019
By Jay Kozlarz
Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower (click here) may find itself in legal hot water due to a recent lawsuit filed by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan alleging that the building’s river-fed cooling system is in violation of multiple state and federal clean water laws.
Madigan’s complaint, filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, says that President Trump’s namesake downtown tower is lacking the necessary permits to pull nearly 20 million gallons of water from the Chicago River each day and discharge a byproduct known as “heated effluent” back in the waterway.
The lawsuit also states the building’s owners failed to submit a mandatory study detailing the impact of their intake system as well as measures implemented to limit the number of fish killed either by its powerful suction or its heated outflow—which can be up to 35 degrees warmer than ambient river water....
