The Cook County Property Tax Problem

This had (and perhaps still has) the potential of making the Cook County sales tax fiasco look like a mere hiccup.

The Cook County Board had voted, with full support from my incumbent opponent, to institute a "10-25" property tax plan that appeared to be a tax reform, but was actually setting up Cook County taxpayers for a huge property tax increase this year.

10 and 25 were to be the new property tax percentages, 10% for private homes, 25% for businesses, that the measure was to be implemented this year. But it also changed how property values were calculated. Given the powerful recession that began in late 2008 and the historic drop in home values, the best current understanding of how the 10-25 plan would impact the average homeowner's property tax is that it would probably now mean significant increases in how much homeowners were paying.

Homeowners in our area were in place for as much as a 40-50% increase on their property taxes. Experts have been putting out the alarm calls for weeks about it. For example, if you were currently paying $6,000 annually in property taxes, you could expect a bill right around election time this fall for possibly $9,000 instead.

Property tax calculations are an incredibly complicated thing to understand for those of us who are really trying to, much less for the average resident who does not have time to. You can read an editorial comment on the complicated nature of this problem at
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0510-mccarron-20100510,0,7438882.story

Commissioner Goslin, my opponent, supposedly an expert in property issues as a professional real estate developer, along with the current Cook County Board, voted for this plan. Those who voted for it have all sat mum on the subject since news of the impending crisis broke.

Worst of all, with elections only months away, they were reluctant to call attention to their mistake and take steps to correct it.

How could this have happened?

Read the first-hand description of the process (or lack thereof) that led to this quick vote to approve "10-25" in the Chicago Tribune:
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0429-property-20100429,0,7472277.story

What is clear, in hindsight, is that the Cook County Commissioners rubber-stamped something without sitting down and thinking through all the possible outcomes of their actions.

They leaped before they looked.

They did not calculate what the 10-25 proposal would mean if housing values dropped. They did not run all the possible worst-case scenarios. They did not wait for the expert committee investigating 10-25 to put out its final report. They ratified it without fully examining all possible outcomes.

In a press release that I sent out days ago, I was the first candidate for the Cook County Board to call on the state legislature to ratify a remedy for this property tax disaster that was being proposed by state Senator Dan Kotowski, Governor Pat Quinn, and others.

The press release can be viewed at my website http://www.jenniferbishopjenkins.com/

The good news for all of us who pay property taxes in Cook County is that the Illinois General Assembly actually did address this crisis in its very last day before they ended the session, and they passed the property tax cap reform legislation that at least for now puts a band-aid on the crisis. Calculations have not yet been made as to exactly what the numbers will look like with this rescue.

But considering the General Assembly's sometimes inability for the last several years to fix some of the state's biggest problems and its unwillingness to address the state's own budget crisis, their last-minute attention to the pending crisis facing Cook County property taxpayers is certainly noteworthy. In fact, it proves exactly what a political disaster was looming for officials who approved the 10-25 plan with election day less than six months away, that the legislature was so concerned to rescue them along with Cook County property owners.

A few years ago, I retired from a 25-year career in education, the last few years of which I was a high school administrator. I gleaned a key piece of wisdom from those years. When facing deliberations and decisions over a significant issue, I found that our process was always to ask these questions:

What is the worst possible scenario in this situation? What is the likely outcome? What information do we need before we decide?

We would not make a decision until we had the answers to those questions and had obtained all the requisite detailed information.

I will bring that same attention to detail and to decision-making processes on the Cook County Board if the residents of the 14th District are good enough to send me there on November 2. I will not rubber-stamp something just because everyone else is pushing for it, and I will not approve something without knowing the worst-case scenarios and likely outcomes.

Finally, when I join the Cook County Board, I will convene a comprehensive examination of the tax structures in Cook County, particularly property taxes -- a bizarrely complex and unfathomable system crying out for reform from leaders committed to seeing it through -- that directly affects our quality of life.

I am told that this legislative "band-aid," which still leaves a smaller property tax increase in place, only lasts for three years. It keeps the homeowners carrying a bit less of the burden, but temporarily. Some experts tell me that the long-term solution is getting the individual valuations of each of the homes down accurately for property tax assessments. When the market crash that began in 2008 took down the value of so many homes, we should have immediately seen the taxes drop too.

Nonetheless, the hard work of comprehensive tax reform in Illinois must begin immediately.

Update: The Daily Southtown publishes an insightful editorial on the complicated property tax problem. http://www.southtownstar.com/news/kadner/2349824,060310kadner.article