North Cook News

Lawmakers will be choosing survivors and scapegoats if they pass a proposal to tax home repair work, one industry professional argued recently.

“Some people won’t survive,” Michael Menn, president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicago, told the North Cook News.  Menn was talking about a proposed 6.25 percent tax that would be levied on home repairs, landscaping, dry cleaning and the use of storage units.

“This bill would pick winners and losers," he said. “It would be particularly hard on small-business owners, and, just the like the recent tariff on Canadian lumber is expected to cost the U.S. up to 8,000 jobs by the end of the year, this, too, will spell job losses for Illinois.”

Home builder groups have estimated that passage of the proposal would result in the loss of at least 521 jobs across the state, a $47 million decline in home repair and maintenance work, and nearly $8 million less in local and state tax revenue.

“It would affect us tremendously and make for a lot less earnings across the industry,” Menn said. “It’s another unwanted tax, and instead of going in that direction lawmakers need to work together to come up with a way to fix this as opposed to just taxing whole industries.”

Critics have also said the measure would have little overall impact on the state’s massive debt.

Bill Ward, executive director of the Home Builders Association of Illinois, estimated that the tax would generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million in annual revenue -- much less than a similar proposal to tax soft drinks, which could net 10 times that amount.

The home repair tax bill was introduced by Sen. Toi Hutchinson (D-Olympia Fields), who has defended it as a way to help get state out of a budget deficit hole that has now swelled to as much as $13 billion.