Is Cook Co. tax plan an effort to help or just cover?

The Cook County commissioner who was pivotal in raising your sales tax $426 million in February now says he wants to help ease your tax pain.

Commissioner Larry Suffredin, an Evanston Democrat, is working on a proposal that would spread out your property tax payments to three or four times a year instead of the current two.

"I am looking at trying to figure out (a way to do this) because I am concerned about a number of our homeowners," he said. "I'm just concerned for people who got reassessed. They're going to see some pretty big numbers here."

Billing taxpayers four times a year could have the benefit of easier budgeting for homeowners, and might be structured in such a way as to spread out any increases over all four payments, Suffredin said. Currently, any increase in your bill gets tacked on to the second installment, often resulting in sticker shock.

But Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas is fighting the proposal tooth and nail, and has intimated in a memo to commissioners that the move is a smoke-and-mirrors attempt to snow taxpayers currently seething over the sales tax hike.

"The idea that taxpayers would believe that they are paying less by paying more often might be seen as an insult to their intelligence," wrote Pappas in a memo obtained by the Daily Herald.

Suffredin denied that was the purpose of the proposal or that it was designed to deflect attention from his sales tax vote.

Pappas went on to write that the move would probably cost the county $10 million more in increased personnel costs, computer reprogramming charges and lost late-fee revenue.

Whether the numbers are accurate is hard to tell. But Pappas, the only Cook County elected official to consistently reduce both her budget and her staff over the last decade, brings more of a fiscal watchdog reputation to the table than most in county government.

Reached Friday, Pappas declined to elaborate on her letter, or her belief in the motivations behind the proposal. But she said she stood behind the memo.

Suffredin said he was a little taken aback by Pappas' opposition to something still in the planning stages.

"I invited her to come to a meeting to just discuss it and the next thing I know she's sending letters opposing it," he said.

And he said he didn't put much stock in the argument that the county should be trying to preserve the fees earned from late taxpayers.

"It just strikes me that I should be helping people make their payments, not thinking, 'We make money because they pay late,'" he said.

Another undetermined consideration in the plan is the possibility of doubled postage costs for doing 1.8 million mailings four times a year instead of two.

Suffredin said that problem could be solved by still doing just two mailings, but inserting two different coupons, due during different quarters, into one mailing.

Jay Stewart of the Better Government Association said the likelihood that every taxpayer would be able to save and find the second coupon three months after it arrived was slim. Even if only a small minority of taxpayers lost that coupon, it would mean thousands of people losing their payment coupon for the next quarter's installment.

Stewart stressed he had no opinion one way or another on whether the proposal itself was a good way to help taxpayers make their payments easier. And he made no judgments about the motivation hinted at in Pappas' letter.

But the irony of the proposal coming from Suffredin - without whose vote Cook County Board President Todd Stroger could not have increased the sales tax - was not lost on him.

"When you just raised the sales tax - the bottom line is we're paying more in sales taxes. We could use less of that kind of help," he said.

Suffredin has explained his vote as necessary to get Stroger to agree to have the county hospitals taken over by an independent board, a fact Stewart acknowledged.

"(But) people would like to have the overall number be lower rather than 'We're going to make it easier to pay these (same) taxes,'" Stewart said.

Suffredin has no formal proposal yet, he said, but may assemble one in time for the Oct. 1 board meeting.