Editorial: Surprise! Some suburban Chicago residential property tax bills show eye-watering increases

If you live in Des Plaines, or several other communities in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, might we suggest you go online to the Cook County treasurer’s office and check your new property tax bill? We would urge you not to wait for it to hit your mailbox this week. Property taxes are due Dec. 1, and unfortunately you may need to prepare.

Residential taxpayers in those areas are likely in for some unpleasant surprises. You may even want to reconsider some of the major discretionary expenses in your plans.

According to data released by the Cook County treasurer’s office — which does the billing of, not the setting of tax rates — the median property tax bill for single-family home dwellers in Des Plaines has risen by an eye-popping 28.68%. If you look at neighboring Park Ridge, which is on the low end of the increases in that area, you still can see increases of 17.01% for single-family homes.

These increases are just coming into view for most regular folks. One of the quirks of the property tax system is that the first of the two annual installments has to be (by law) exactly 55% percent of the previous year’s total tax amount. (Each tax year’s property taxes are billed and due the following year.)

Only in the revealing second installment (the one now coming due) do you see what really has happened to that year’s taxes: This one reflects new tax rates, levies and changes in assessments, as well as any dollars saved by any approved exemptions for which you have qualified. If you live in some of these communities, you are likely to need any and all that are available to you.

What happened? As we’ve noted several times before, Cook County’s three-person Board of Review (where you go when you or your costly attorney want to challenge the assessor’s valuation of your property) actually uses a different valuation methodology for commercial properties that is generally more friendly to landlords than that of Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi, who is in charge of the first, main go-round.

We think this is problematic for everyone but the lawyers: Appeals courts look again at cases decided in lower courts to see if the decisions correctly applied the law, but they don’t come up with new rules to do so. But that is the property tax system we have and, in this case, it appears from looking at the data that the Board of Review acted to somewhat shift the aggregate burden from commercial properties (which often are very well represented legally) to residents. As they have done in the past.

That’s one reason for the rise. Another, bigger reason is that Kaegi’s office decided to take on the role of soothsayer after the COVID-19 pandemic hit: Staffers attempted to predict likely pandemic-related job losses and then use those calculations to lower property assessments.

The idea was to give homeowners a break, but cutting the assessed values doesn’t automatically result in lower taxes since government entities still need the same money to operate. All it did was redistribute the burden. The results were famously problematic from the start, and we’re now in a situation where those pandemic adjustments have been removed. The results, predictably enough, are some sudden big increases in bills.

The plan was well intentioned: If you recall the first weeks of the pandemic, it became clear that property values were falling fast and there was pressure on the assessor to do something. But post-pandemic, we see many residential property values actually increasing in value and we’re reminded that property tax assessments are supposed to be based on actual value in the past (gleaned from sales), not some assumption about values in the future based, weirdly, on the unemployment rate.

If we all knew the real estate values of the future, we’d all make our fortunes investing (or shorting) with that foreknowledge. In reality, of course, we don’t. And the “we” in that sentence includes the assessor’s office. Or so the ill-conceived experiment showed.

When looking for the rest of the blame, you have to add in all the other taxing bodies in those suburban municipalities, many of which always seem to hit taxpayers for as much as they can, up to the amount allowed by law.

You might call this a triple whammy for taxpayers in a county that relies too much for too many things on property tax revenue. It’s not so bad in the city, but it’s worth noting that while Mayor Brandon Johnson has said he does not want to raise the city’s proportion of property taxes, the huge Chicago Public Schools portion was not part of that pledge.

Concidentally, on Thursday, CPS said it was projecting a $391 million deficit next year.

Hold onto your wallets.

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