McLean County Times

Senator David Koehler has introduced SB2447, which will increase property taxes to the majority of Mclean County property owners and is designed to provide the Bloomington Normal Airport Authority with a greatly expanded tax base.

Decades ago, when the cities of Bloomington and Normal decided to build an airport under the Airport Authorities Act, it did so without regard to property owners not situated within the authority boundaries.

Now the Airport Authority wants to force property owners of the entire County of Mclean to pay taxes to the authority to support its operation.

Typically, the method of including properties into the tax base of an airport authority is to have residents of specific townships pass a referendum, or for specific owners to sign a petition for annexation if they want to get saddled with more debt.

Within Section 9.1 of the Airport Authorities Act are directions on how to properly annex additional properties into the authority either by 1) a petition signed by a majority of the landowners in the area to be annexed, or 2) by a petition for referendum signed by at least 10% of the landowners and submitted to the voters as a referendum. These methods would, however, require the agreement of property owners, which is apparently too big of a hill to climb for Bloomington and Normal.

Instead of using the statute to expand its tax base, the Bloomington Normal Airport Authority found a friendly legislator to attempt to circumvent state law and the voters, and to force all real estate within the county to pay property taxes to the authority.

Incidentally, previous attempts at this have failed, let’s hope SB2447 fails also.


This story was originally published by Edgar County Watchdogs. Read the original HERE.