By: Mark Fitzgerald Todd Stroger is so fed up with a daily feature in the Chicago Tribune that he's vowed never to buy another copy, according to a local columnist. What's bugging the powerful Cook County (Ill.) Board President? The new redesign criticized by many as confusing? The disappearance of some well-known Trib writers and columnists through buyouts and layoffs?
No, according to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed. Stroger is no longer buying the Trib because of a feature on its editorial page that counts up the number of days since the county board raised the sales tax to 10.25% in Chicago, the highest in the nation -- and counts down the number of days until the Feb. 2, 2010 primary election.
"Your Sales Tax Calendar" has run nearly every day in the Tribune since July, soon after the board voted in the tax hike.
Tribune Editorial Page Editor R. Bruce Dold said the sales tax calendar is the newspaper's third major campaign effort against the board. The paper endorsed a reformer candidate, who narrowly lost to Stroger, the son of a longtime county board president who was installed on a Democratic Party machine vote by the board.
"Then when they had the sales tax proposal, we ran the phone numbers of the county commissioners in the paper," Dold said. "We came so close to beating that thing, and we failed, so we were looking for some way to keep the momentum going."
Dold said Charlie Meyerson, a producer for chicagotribune.com, came up with the idea of a running calendar. Dold recognized it as a a way to "keep (the issue) in your face every day."
On the paper's Web site, the calendar counts up (and down) to the second. Check it out at The
E&P Pub.
Ironically, Stroger was scheduled to meet with the Tribune editorial board Monday, but canceled, Dold said: "When you're up against entrenched government, this is what you have to do. Unless you're awfully persistent about it, it's tough to change something that's as intransigent as a political machine."
If the Tribune keeps running the calendar, it's clearly in for the long haul. As of Monday, it was still 421 days until Cook County voters get their chance to kick out commissioners at the polls.
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This story has been corrected. The original version misattributed a quote to Meyerson.
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