In October, the Palos Park Village Council was one of the first in the area to talk about keeping the 1% tax on groceries that the state was phasing out.
On Aug. 11, the council finally made it official, voting 4-0 in favor of the tax with Finance Commissioner G. Darryl Reed absent.
Gov. JB Pritzker signed legislation last August to repeal the 1% tax starting Jan. 1, 2026, however, he and the state allowed individual municipalities to keep it going if they wanted.
Palos Park Mayor Nicole Milovich-Walters said the village needs the money the tax generated and that residents will not see any changes on their purchases.
“This doesn’t change what you are buying now,” she said. “The state has collected the tax for us. But now the state is saying ‘we aren’t going to charge it as a state, we’re going to let the towns charge 1% and we’ll collect the money for you just like we always did before.’
“It is a necessary evil to keep our services working the way they are.”
The mayor added that the total tax will likely be under $100 per year for families based on statistics that she found.
“The average amount spent annually by a family of four in Illinois is $9,274 and those numbers are as of 2022,” she said. “The average tax is $92.74 annually – the 16th lowest in the United States.
“It kind of puts into perspective what that 1% looks like.”
For the village, the $7 million in the budget for the general fund would be impacted by the loss of the tax. She said it would represent a $211,000 loss annually.
“We use the general fund for daily operations,” she said. “We are not home rule, and we have limited options available to replace revenue shortages that have already been approved in our budget.
“Retaining the existing grocery tax will permit further community investment and prevent budget cuts of projects, departments or staff.”
She said that the money generated from the grocery tax will come from Jewel-Osco, Walgreens and the Shell gas station mini-mart . She also said people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will not be affected by the tax.
Milovich-Walters added that 16 communities under the Southwest Conference of Mayors umbrella have either adopted the tax or plan to adopt it. She added that 331 communities in 85 counties in the state have voted to keep the tax.
Neighboring Palos Heights approved keeping the tax in May.