It could be something, or it could be nothing, but at this moment the swirl of factors brewing in Evanston is definitely a situation worth watching.
Northwestern University is in crisis management mode after firing its football and baseball coaches amidst reports about serious problems within each program. That would be a problem for any school, but the timing is especially difficult given attempts to win approval for an $800 million football stadium renovation.
A swath of townspeople already opposed the project, so the exposure of a seedy underbelly is welcome ammunition to that effort. But the confluence sheds light on a longstanding trend of community spotlight on the tax-exempt status for a campus whose 240 acres occupies nearly 5% of Evanston’s total 7.8 square miles.
In March 2000, according to Liz Austin in The Daily Northwestern, “83.5 percent of voting Evanston residents supported the City Council’s advisory referendum proposing that NU pay its ‘fair share’ of the cost of municipal services the city provides for the university.” The same article said the “bitter debate over whether the university should do more to ensure the financial security of the city” goes back more than a century.
The school has long maintained it adds value in terms of taxes and fees from which it isn’t exempt, jobs it provides and purchases from local businesses. It’s a logical argument. It would be discordant for me to write repeatedly about the ancillary benefits a hospital provides a community – as often noted in lamenting the fate of St. Margaret’s in Spring Valley – and pretend NU is getting a free ride.
But Northwestern’s endowment exceeds $16 billion. It has a $200 million annual budget for financial aid alone, pretty important when one year living and studying on campus is estimated to cost $87,804. Such totals are why people call on NU to be more like Yale, which in November 2021 pledged $52 million over six years to the town of New Haven, Conn., on top of $83 million already committed voluntarily in the same span.
Some officials suggest NU engage in payment in lieu of tax – PILOT – a concept recently affiliated with another football stadium project, the Chicago Bears’ attempts to spend $5 billion overhauling 326 acres encompassing the former Arlington Heights horse track. Northwestern is cool to that effort, unsurprising given its ability to hold the revolution at bay more than two decades after a landslide referendum.
The NU-Evanston dynamics are unique in Illinois, especially when tossing in extra ingredients like the current scandal. But every assessor can report what percentage of their jurisdiction is tax exempt and estimate the land value of those properties. Should costs start outweighing benefits, these conversations become inevitable.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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July 18, 2023 at 06:07AM
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