Chicago mayor pushes to keep 1% grocery tax that state will drop 4q2s6t
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CHICAGO - Illinois retailers are pushing back on Chicago Chicago.
This comes as the city faces an October deadline to decide what to do.
Retail groups on Wednesday said it's sort of like death by a thousand cuts.
The backstory:
Gov. JB Pritzker essentially put cities like Chicago in a trick box by eliminating the 1% grocery tax as part of his budget. That money had been distributed to local governments.
Now these governments have to decide whether to implement their own grocery tax to make up for the lost revenue.
The Illinois Retail Merchants Association (IRMA) said a grocery tax, on top of a potential delivery credit card swipe fee, are too much for grocers to handle.
"The message is that they have to consider the consumer," said Rob Karr the president and CEO of IRMA. The retailer considers the consumer every day. Grocery, as you know, is one of the most narrow profit margins of all the industries that are out there, but particularly in retail. And so they really have no place else to go with this. That's something that has to get ed on to the consumer, so it really comes down, again to are the city leaders, is the mayor and the city council willing to impose to yet another financial pressure on their consumers?"
Local perspective:
The city has until October to decide what to do and the tax will expire in January. Johnson's budget team has said City Council will need to reinstate this task or risk blowing an even bigger hole into what's expected to be more than a $1 billion budget gap next year.
"The grocery tax already exists," Johnson said on Tuesday. "There is a process in which the collection of the grocery tax is now being placed in the responsibility of municipalities, right? So, it was a function that the state of Illinois decided to relinquish and leave it to the cities to collect the tax. So we're not creating a grocery tax, we're just creating a process by which we can collect it."
There are about 100 other municipalities around the region that will reinstate this grocery tax, or at least try.
Fox 32 spoke with the Republican mayor of Orland Park, who said he has no choice but to keep a tax because losing it would blow too big of a hole into the budget.