In her bid for the Democrat's nomination to run for Cook County board president, Alderman Toni Preckwinkle has consistently backed the idea of rolling back the county’s sales tax to eliminate the entire penny-on-the-dollar increase.
When the campaign started heating up in the fall, she said she would support a phased reduction of the sales tax, which she calls regressive and harmful to underprivileged residents.
But in recent days - at a debate hosted by ABC7 and Saturday at a candidate forum - she has started to sound a little like two of her opponents, Clerk of Court Dorothy Brown and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District President Terrence O’Brien, proposing an immediate rollback of the remaining half of the sales tax hike and finding alternative revenue sources to make up for the more than $200 million generated by the tax.
If elected, "I’ll begin work immediately to eliminate the sales tax, she said in the ABC7 debate, which aired on network television Sunday.
O’Brien, who has pledged to eliminate the tax on his first day of office should he be elected, has teased Preckwinkle for what he sees as a moving stance.
“I’m glad to see the alderman is coming over to my way of thinking,” he said at a candidate forum at Columbia College Saturday. “If you wait for four years, you never end up repealing that sales tax because you become dependent on that money.”
But Scott Cisek, Preckwinkle's campaign manager, says O'Brien is mischaracterizing Preckwinkle's plan.
"We've always said we'll begin immediately looking at doing it," he says. "What we're going to do immediately upon being elected is to look at how to do it intelligently."
Brown has repeatedly said she would search for alternative revenue streams, including putting advertisements on county Web sites and applying for more grants.