Right now, homeowners in Cook County are getting squeezed by rising property tax bills while big corporations get sweetheart deals. The system is rigged, and it’s why the March 17 county election is so important.
Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi ran to make the system fairer for homeowners, and he’s made real progress. But powerful special interests have blocked a number of his reforms, and now they’re bankrolling a primary challenger to stop him.
In 2018, Fritz took over a notoriously corrupt and opaque Assessor’s office. Political donors and corporations got special treatment and prominent politicians at each level of our Government — Speaker Madigan in Springfield, and Alderman Ed Burke in Chicago, all had private businesses that made money winning tax breaks, and the previous Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios granted assessment reductions for their clients while he lobbied Madigan and Burke for legislation that benefited Berrios’ private lobbying clients.
Fritz immediately cleaned house and has turned the Assessor’s office into a national model. As the Cook County Assessor, Fritz Kaegi:
Ended decades of pay-to-play corruption with day-one ethics reforms, including a ban on gifts and campaign donations from property tax lawyers and appraisers
Made assessments fairer by hiring actual data scientists and publishing
the office’s assessment models and underlying data online for everyone to see, winning national awards for transparency
Stopped valuation schemes that let commercial landlords keep their properties and storefronts vacant and dodge property taxes (I brought this issue to Fritz’s attention)
Created more than 15,000 units of affordable housing, at no cost to taxpayers, with a new special assessment program
But obstacles to Fritz’s work remain. The pay-to-play system, where political donors get special treatment, is still in place at the Cook County Board of Review, which has the power to undo Fritz’s work by appeals. The Board of Review commissioners have been handing out massive cuts to big corporations, driving up property tax bills for homeowners across Cook County.
The fact is, property taxes and assessments are a zero-sum game in Cook County. If one group of property owners has their property value lowered, it just pushes their tax burden onto everyone else. Making the system FAIR is what Fritz Kaegi is all about.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time in government, it’s that reform is very hard-won. It took over a decade just to get full powers for our City Inspector General, and it took a criminal indictment of a powerful alderman to FINALLY stop many abuses of aldermanic power.
The tax assessment system is even tougher to crack, but Fritz is using every opportunity he has to stand up for homeowners:
He championed an expansion to the Senior Freeze program that recently passed in Springfield, helping thousands more seniors get relief and stay in their homes
He’s leading the charge on “circuit breaker” legislation to cap how much property taxes can spike in a given year
He’s working with other county offices to reform to how commercial properties are assessed and appealed by the Board of Review
Fritz is running for another term to keep up the fight and stand up to the corporations and property tax lawyers making your tax bills higher. He’s working to make sure commercial properties are fairly assessed and paying their fair share in taxes so their tax burden is no longer shifted onto you.
Special interests still hold too much power over our property tax system, and right now, they’re all laser-focused against the one public servant who is trying to put the taxpayers first: Fritz Kaegi. That should tell you everything you need to know about who to support in this race.
I’m sticking with Fritz in the March primary, and I hope you will, too.
Michele Smith
Former Alderman, 43rd Ward
Former Chair, Ethics Committee, City Council
I’m an analytics professional, and I will be voting for Fritz Kaegi. I’ve downloaded the ptaxsim R package that his staff created so I can simulate the methodology used to assess my property.
How would I be able to do that under Berrios acolyte Hynes?
https://github.com/ccao-data/ptaxsim
Fritzy BLAMES, Hynes Explains. The idea that Fritz Kaegi has “fixed” Cook County’s property tax system ignores the reality homeowners are living with: volatile assessments, inconsistent valuations, and a surge in appeals that show the system is anything but stable. Blaming the Board of Review and “special interests” for correcting commercial overvaluations is a convenient distraction from the inaccuracies coming out of the assessor’s office, which routinely produce values that don’t match market data and create exactly the instability homeowners are now facing. The claim that commercial appeals are driving up residential taxes oversimplifies a system in which rising levies—not the Board—are pushing bills higher, and Kaegi’s chaotic assessments only make matters worse. His touted “affordable housing” numbers rely on reclassifications of developments that were already happening, not the creation of new units, and calling the office a “national model” doesn’t change the fact that transparency means little when the underlying valuations are unreliable. Instead of acknowledging these failures, Kaegi repeatedly points fingers at others while homeowners deal with unpredictable bills and a destabilized system. Cook County deserves competence and consistency—not political spin that ignores the real consequences for taxpayers.