This is a follow up to my SFC Career Education 7B Analysis article from December 1, 2009.

Which buildings shown below are legally blighted?

A)  231 N Martingale, Schaumburg
B)  200 N Martingale, Schaumburg
C)  300 N Martingale, Schaumburg
D)  Somewhere in an inner city

The answer is A, B, and C.  These three buildings constitute the newly fabricated North Martingale Road Commercial Blight Area in Schaumburg.  (D) Is a just a file photo for comparison.  This what real blight looks like as described by the laws governing commercial blight areas in Illinois.

On Aug 25, 2009, the Village of Schaumburg declared 231 N Martingale as a one building blight area.   On December 1, the Village of Schaumburg expanded this commercial blight area to two more office buildings across the street at 200 and 300 N Martingale Road.  None of the buildings are really blighted.  The consultant report claiming blight in this area is essentially a set of unsubstantiated opinions that are biased in favor of their client, Career Education.

If it were not for Career Education approaching the Village to help get a huge property tax break, there would be no Martingale Blight Area and no sudden concern for blight in Schaumburg.  This is really a charade by Career Education and their willing accomplices at the Village of Schaumburg to get a 7B tax break.  Career Education wants to squeeze what they can out of the taxpayers of Cook County while the Village takes credit for moving a business to Schaumburg at the expense of Hoffman Estates.

What does a blight area have to do with a tax break?   A declared Commercial Blight Area is a prerequisite to obtain a 7B property tax reclassification.  No blight area?  No tax break.   And it is a very large tax break.   A 7B results in a 60% decrease in property tax for 10 years:   40% in year 11: 20% in year 12:  Full taxes in year 13.   Every other taxpayer in Cook County will have to pay extra because Career Education is paying less.

The original scheme was hatched this past summer when Career Education approached the Village of Schaumburg planning department  saying they wanted to move their headquarters to a vacant building at 231 N Martingale, two blocks south of Woodfield Shopping Center, but only if they could get a 7B tax break.   The scheme included letting Career Education consultants, True Partners, write a blight study to justify it.  Then the Village would rush some resolutions through to rubber stamp the blight area.   Public hearings and due diligence to check out the blight report would be bypassed and the blight report would be left unpublished.    That went according to plan and Career Education applied for a 7B with the County in late October.

Then they ran into a snag.   Somewhere around late October or early November, the Village found out their original marching orders from the Career Education consultants were wrong and that one building does not qualify as a “blight area” per State Law and County guidelines.   A blight area that just happened to consist solely of one building where a company wants a tax break looks bad.  It makes it look like the blight area was concocted solely to get a tax break.   That is exactly what is happening.

Career Education and the Village were not giving up though.  The solution was to fabricate a larger blight area by adding an additional couple of buildings adjacent to 231 N Martingale.  I don’t know who picked 200 and 300 N. Martingale across the street, but True Partners hastily amended the original blight report to add in the vague references to fictional blight at these two buildings.  The file date on the new labeled North Martingale Commercial Blight Area Qualification Report is November 9, 2009.   They just needed to redo the rubber stamp resolutions and rush them back to the county officials evaluating the tax break.  They also managed to keep the blight area expansion hidden from the public until the last minute so there would be less time for the public to read it and see it for the scam that it is.

A credible designation of a Commercial Blight Area should entail months of fact gathering and input by committees, trustees, village planners and the community.  Village officials should be aware of it, at least.  Yet, just one week before the blight area was approved, at a Nov. 24 Village board meeting, I remarked that there must be an error in the resolution because it included 200 and 300 North Martingale.  The Village Director of Community Development got up and agreed that that was a mistake.  He said the Blight Area was only at 231 N Martingale.  The board agreed to postpone the vote until the resolution could be corrected to remove 200 and 300 Martingale from blight area.   So as of Nov 24, the Village planning director and no one on the Village Board claimed to know anything about 200 and 300 N Martingale being in a blight area!

Surprise!    The next thing you know, a special board meeting is called for December 1 with this blight area as the only topic.   Only hours before the meeting I found out the reason for the emergency meeting was to add 200 and 300 N Martingale to the blight area.   The resolution was unchanged from the week before because the Village planners had intended to expand the blight area to additional properties all along.   I only found out about it hours before the vote on December 1 by pressuring the Village to comply with a week old FOIA request for the resolutions and any updated blight report.

That this expanded blight area was unknown to the Village Planning director, Christopher Huff, and the village board one week before passage is impossible to believe.    The secrecy, deception, and total lack of due diligence in the determination of this blight expansion is an outrage. I seriously doubt all board members read and understood the blight report before voting on it.  The amended blight report was never published and there was no way for the public to comment on it before it was voted on.

Now that the Village and Career Education have their newly fabricated blight area with multiple buildings, they still miss the point.  It has to be blighted buildings, not any buildings.  The building they added are not a threat to anyone’s safety and welfare and do not qualify.  These added buildings are newer than 231 N Martingale.  They already had an absurdly weak argument for blight at 231 N Martingale and adding better buildings just weakens the case for blight.

The Revised Blight Report for the 200 and 300 Martingale Buildings

The Revised blight report for the 200 and 300 buildings is pathetically insufficient and obviously hastily put together.  They couldn’t even get the exterior picture for 300 N Martingale right.  There are no interior photos either because they didn’t bother or there was nothing there to photograph that could be posed to look like blight.  There are no inspections by qualified inspectors.  No documented building code violations.  There are no references or documentation of any kind to support the condition of the buildings.  No history of vacancy.  No record of any Village personnel verifying anything at all in the report, even though they signed off on it.    The report is largely vague, unsubstantiated, subjective comments.

To show how sloppy the report is, and how little the Village knows about these buildings, there is a telling contradiction between the old and new reports.  200 N Martingale is really not even one building.  It is half a building.  It is the North tower of a two tower building with a common lobby and lower level.

The South half is 150 N Martingale.  For tax purposes it is all one building.  Here is notable part.   In the original Blight report, the 231 Martingale building was compared to the better buildings around it as an argument for how it has not kept up with the rest of the neighborhood.  One of those comparatively better buildings was 150 N Martingale.  Therefore, the same building they claimed was an example of an unblighted neighborhood building is now suddenly blighted in the new report.  When you are fabricating blight, anything is possible.

The blight analysis is supposed to prove that a minimum of 5 blight factors are present.   It doesn’t.   There is only one blighting factor evident at 200 and 300 N Martingale and that is vacancy.  The other four are contrived from unsupported opinions, misinterpretation of the blight factors, and conditions that do not exist now, but might occur sometime in the future.

Age:

Age was not proven to be a blighting factor.  Not a single example of age-related wear and tear was provided.  Age was claimed to have contributed to vacancies, but the report provided no statistics comparing local buildings of different ages.   The 10 and 20 N Martingale buildings mentioned as newer buildings in the area also have a lot of vacancies as listed at http://www.ci.schaumburg.il.us/EDevel/Sites/Pages/OfficeSpace.aspx Vacancies in these buildings could just as easily be a result of the rent being too high, the generally weak economy, bad management, or bad luck.   Vacancy is its own blight factor.   It appears the game being played here is to stretch a single blight factor, vacancy, across several other factors to pad the blight factor count up to five.

Dilapidation:

Not a single example of dilapidation was provided for 200 N Martingale.  What primary structural components were neglected?  What repairs are needed?  What are True Partners qualifications to make such a non-supported conclusion?  These are unsubstantiated comments that are too vague to be taken seriously.  The report also has a math problem.  If you convert the individual building evaluations to the numbers, 0 for no dilapidation, 1 for limited dilapidation, and 2 for meaningful dilapidation, then the scores of 0, 1, and 2 average to 1, not 2.   The average assessment for the three buildings should be “present to a limited extent”, not “present to a meaningful extent.

Obsolescence:

For 200 and 300 N Martingale, not a single example of obsolescence was given.   Vacancy was again listed as the cause of obsolescence with no evidence to support it.   Excessive vacancy is a separate blight factor and should not be misapplied to obsolescence, which has its own independent meaning.

Deterioration:

For 200 and 300 N Martingale, not a single example of deterioration was given.  Vacancy was again listed as the cause of deterioration.   Excessive vacancy is a separate blight factor and should not be misapplied to deterioration, which has its own independent meaning

Excessive Vacancies:

For 200 and 300 N Martingale, this is the only credible blight factor present.

Summary:

200 and 300 Martingale in Schaumburg are not blighted because they have only one significant blighting factor, vacancy.   231 Martingale also has only one blighting factor, vacancy.   Therefore, the North Martingale Commercial Blight Area is not blighted because each building has only one blighting factor, which is far short of the required five.

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