Editorial: Fritz Kaegi brought reform to a broken Cook County assessor’s office. He’s our choice in the Democratic primary.

In 2018, when voters chose Fritz Kaegi over longtime incumbent Joseph Berrios in the Democratic primary for Cook County assessor, they sent a message — an unequivocal rebuke of the “Chicago Way” of governance.

Fairness never factored into Berrios’ assessments. Moneyed insiders in tandem with politically connected tax appeal lawyers won favorable valuations, as long as they kept donations coming to Berrios’ campaign coffers. Nepotism and patronage ran rampant. Ethics rules went ignored. Year after year, it was the county’s Black and Latino populations that suffered the most under Berrios’ system, through disproportionately higher property taxes.

Kaegi ran on a pledge to overhaul Berrios’ dysfunctional office, and voters took him at his word. And on the whole, he has delivered.

The mission was steeped in challenges. Cook County’s property tax system is the nation’s largest, with 1.9 million properties that must be assessed. Kaegi inherited not just a deeply flawed, ethically bankrupt office, but also a decades-old data system heavily reliant on reams of paper. Kaegi told the editorial board at an endorsement session that when he first took office, his people found 600 tons of paper tax appeals kept in storage.

The image screamed inefficiency, but it also highlighted the inequity of a system in which the predominant way to lower property taxes was to hire a tax appeal lawyer. That’s something many property owners have viewed as an annoying, routine and costly chore, but it has meant less affluent owners have seen badly needed successful appeals compromised by hefty, contingent legal fees. Fees they can ill afford.

“It was like the physical embodiment of the distrust in our system, and the excessive cost and inequities in it — and this is what needs to change,” Kaegi told us. “We needed to change that culture.”

Kaegi embarked on a modernization of the office’s data system, replaced most of Berrios’ top staffers and stopped the office’s practice of accepting campaign contributions from tax appeal lawyers.

He says his reforms have yielded results. Tax appeals have dropped by 30% from their levels in 2018. And for the second straight year, he says, homeowner property taxes have gone up by only 1%.

Nevertheless, there’s much Kaegi still needs to fix. His drive to infuse equity into a broken assessment regimen has frustrated commercial enterprises big and small, which have seen their property taxes skyrocket. In some cases, small businesses have seen their property taxes rise 300% or more. Those kinds of tax hits can be enough to spark an exodus of businesses out from Cook County, a potentially disastrous possibility since the broadside it would deliver to the tax base would drive residential property taxes even higher.

Business leaders have told us Kaegi refuses to listen to their concerns. That shouldn’t happen. If business owners say they don’t understand how Kaegi is calculating these assessments, then Kaegi needs to sit down with them and establish a dialogue.

Also, under his watch, second-installment property tax bills will be delivered to homes late this year. Usually, the second installment hits mailboxes by July. Kaegi and officials at the Cook County Board of Review, which examines tax appeals, blame each other for the delay.

Homeowners care less about blame and more about a remedy. An inordinate delay could keep homeowners from realizing their maximum property tax deduction on 2022 federal income tax returns. Kaegi told us the bills should be sent out before the end of the year.

Taxpayers will hold you to that pledge, Mr. Kaegi, and will expect the next assessor to get the bills out on time next year.

Kaegi’s opponent in the Democratic primary, Kari Steele, has shown efficient stewardship as board president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, the governmental body that oversees issues such as clean drinking water, flood control, sewage treatment and stormwater management. She manages the district’s $1.2 billion budget and its 2,000 employees, and under her the district enjoys a triple-A bond rating. She’s intelligent and energetic, but we see no reason now to change leadership at the assessor’s office when so much progress on reform has been achieved under Kaegi.

We trust Kaegi will fix what still needs to be fixed in his office, and carry on with the commitment to reform that keeps the dysfunctional Berrios era in the rear view mirror.

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