Niles Township's Tax Gobbling Food Pantry

The Niles Township Government has been busy inventing ways to use tax money ever since its real raison d'etre evaporated with demise of the last farms in Skokie -- sometime around 1930.

With no rural roads to maintain it decided to get into the food giveaway business and has been doing so with a gusto that would make the architects of the Great Society blush. That is to say, it has been busy hiring bureaucrats to give away food.

The anachronistic Government of Niles Township has a food pantry at its building at 5225 Main St. in Skokie. It says it gives away food to some 2,700 North suburbanites who claim to need it each month.

To do this it gets food donations from various governmental and private sources. You would think, then, it would be a fairly simple matter to hand out the food. But not when government is involved.

According to the Better Government Association salary database, the Niles Twp. Government shells out $81k a year to 2 employees to hand out the food:

Cynthia Carranza, Food Pantry Director - $43,680
Lawrence Storts, Food Pantry Clerk - $37,500

In addition it asks the federal government for infrastructure money for their food giveaway project.

Most recently, they got a $5,300 piece of a federal block grant for an emergency back-up generator for their refrigerator.

That is, I suppose, so that in the event of nuclear attack their $81k food bureaucrats will still be able to hand out frozen pizzas to needy suburbanites.

Perhaps next year they'll ask FEMA for a grant for hardened underground bunkers so that their food handouts can withstand a possible Lake Michigan Tsunami.

Meanwhile just down the road on Howard near McCormick in Evanston, the Vineyard Church hands out food to more than 140 families a week -- a greater number of people total than the Niles Township government does.

And they manage to do it all without a paying a single employee anything.

And even without a FEMA-supplied emergency backup generator for their fridge.