Carol Stream adopts grocery tax
Carol Stream trustees adopted a 1% grocery tax during Monday’s village board meeting.
A home-rule municipality, Carol Stream approved the grocery tax in response to the loss of proceeds from the statewide 1% grocery tax Gov. JB Pritzker eliminated last August.
The state grocery tax will end Jan. 1, 2026, which is when the Carol Stream tax will go into effect. Illinois communities seeking no interruption in collecting these taxes need to adopt an ordinance and file it with the Illinois Department of Revenue by Oct. 1.
Carol Stream joins other suburbs such as Algonquin, Elk Grove Village, Schaumburg, and Wheaton in recently approving grocery taxes. Bannockburn, Burlington and Palatine got a head start filing the paperwork, adopting ordinances last year after Pritzker’s action.
Indications that Carol Stream would adopt a grocery tax were there in a budget workshop held after the Feb. 3 village board meeting.
“We have no choice but to put it back on or we’ll have another … hole in our budget,” Mayor Frank Saverino Sr. said.
In a memo before the board Monday, Carol Stream Finance Director Jon Batek estimated that without replacing the statewide tax the village could lose $550,000 to $600,000 in revenue.
Batek’s memo said eliminating the tax also would disrupt a redevelopment agreement with the developer of an Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets store at 550 E. North Ave.
A portion of the development incentives are paid directly from grocery taxes, according to the memo.
While Carol Stream and other municipalities may adopt their own grocery taxes, it remains administered, collected, distributed and enforced by the Illinois Department of Revenue.
Saverino is wary of this scenario.
“In a year from now or two years from now, is (the state) going to come back and say, we need to take 40% of that 1% because we’re collecting it for you?” he asked rhetorically at Monday’s meeting.
“They’ve figured out a way to give us the responsibility, but then we have no way to stop them from taking the money away,” he added.