With a headline like “Weathering the Coming Fiscal Storm,” you’d think the report might have gotten my attention earlier, but it took a post-holidays inbox cleaning session to draw focus.

The Nov. 16 report arrived courtesy of the University of Illinois Chicago’s Government Finance Research Center. Deborah Carroll, that agency’s director, explained the GFRC’s role in addressing concerns about local governments facing difficult financial decisions when American Rescue Plan Act funding ends in 2026.

To read the piece in full, and perhaps get lost in several useful links to prior work, visit tinyurl.com/2026fiscalstorm.

The upshot is a recommendation that Congress create something similar to the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, which the Federal Register says was established in 1959 and disbanded in 1996 following a mission “To strengthen the American federal system and improve the ability of federal, state, and local governments to work together cooperatively, efficiently and effectively.”

At the risk of getting lost in government lexicon, and making sure not to praise bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake, the report sheds light on concerns about how increased remote work influences the value of commercial properties as well as how state-by-state variations in rules dictating municipal financing complicate the ability to craft broad solutions.

Although the report routinely refers to cities, the concerns are relevant for any local government worried about permanent alterations to property, income and sales tax bases. The degree to which a taxing body generates its source revenue from each pool dictates response strategies, which is not anything new to the elected officials tasked with making such decisions but a useful illustration of why there aren’t any top-down solutions.

The report’s Chicago reference notes commercial and industrial real estate is assessed at 2.5 times the rate used for residential property. So, while there is a proposal for a $1.2 billion repurposing of office and other commercial property in the La Salle Street corridor, the potential increase in residential space won’t likely be enough to offset an expected reduction in property tax collections.

But any Illinois community with a central business district, even just a few blocks, has a stake in what happens in Springfield with regard to funding mechanisms and local control.

“As cities and their states come to understand that any desired outcome (e.g., downtown growth) is constrained by the behavior of the states, the alignment of their economy and the competitiveness of their fiscal policies to both extract resources and provide services,” the report states, “the prospects for enhancing the fiscal authority of cities to determine their own futures should become apparent to both parties.”

Waiting for Congress to help might be imprudent. Expect conversation on this issue as lawmakers return to Springfield this month.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.