The vast differences between community trusts, Special Service Areas (SSAs) and unelected neighborhood groups were properly distinguished in two recent Facebook posts by West Loop resident Moshe Tamssot.
Shared with the “True West Loop” Facebook group, the posts help local citizens identify the different organizations that have all attempted to alter the neighborhood’s overall infrastructure over the course of several years.
The Chicago Community Trust has been established since 1915. All community trusts are supposed to be engineered to solve the challenges in their local communities.
These trusts are democratically elected where all residents and business owners in the area are able to vote on officials being appointed. They are based on servant leadership with no private agendas and are focused on volunteering and solving issues brought up by community members.
Community trusts are built with the intention of being completely transparent with the public, with the communities setting up the meeting agendas and every meeting is broadcast live on the internet for all to view. They rally the city, businesses and residents together in support of a better government based on the people’s interests.
SSAs are tax districts that impose property taxes on nearby businesses and residents in order to privately fund government-initiated projects. These groups hold no democratic elections, as the seven commissioners are appointed by the city's mayor and limit community involvement in their agendas.
There is very little transparency needed in SSAs and they have little interaction with the community in general.
Unelected neighborhood groups also do not organize open democratic elections, and in Chicago, the West Central Association (WCA) sells board positions to applicants. The boards of these groups, as opposed to the general public, generally vote on decisions.
Also like SSAs, unelected neighborhood groups do not include community input and have their own agendas to fund smaller government projects. However, they are not transparent at all and Chicago’s group only began live broadcasting its meetings after the West Loop Community Organization (WLCO) overturned its ban on recording.
Members of unelected neighborhood groups often compete with each other and are usually conflicted once one member’s opinion outweighs the majority. They also routinely make their decisions before any community meetings occur and rarely serve the community’s needs.
Tamssot’s second post praises the the West Loop Community Trust for being primarily concerned with community issues.
“What makes the West Loop Community Trust different is that it’s tailored to the unique realities of the West Loop, as many community trusts are,” Tamssot wrote. “The West Loop Community Trust returns the vote to the people so that it’s the community that is identifying, prioritizing and funding neighborhood improvement projects, from the top down — with no cheating.”
Tamssot highlighted the trust’s actions in retail space that generates enough revenue to rent out public space or purchase multiple STEM Labs, rather than another organization’s decision to exchange a $70,000 STEM Lab in Skinner for the “massive” Union West Development on Madison.
“We’re building up an endowment for when the boom is over, rather than blowing the wad when times are good,” Tamssot wrote.
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