Brace for slightly higher property tax bills in Cook County

Tax rates are going down in Cook County, but only because tax revenues from tax bills to be sent out over the next weeks are going the other direction, the county clerk said Tuesday.

With the county's overlapping 1,200 taxing agencies drawing from 1.8 million properties to create 2,500 possible variations in a tax bill, it's almost impossible to generalize across regions or sometimes even within single cities. Yet, without any new local referendum to hike taxes, a homeowner in the northern suburbs with a $200,000 house should see an increase in the neighborhood of $100 when the tax bill arrives, officials said.

Cook County Clerk David Orr released the 2008 tax rates today, as property taxes raise a total of $11.2 billion, up 4.2 percent from $10.75 billion last year. By law, that's based on a 4.1 percent annual rise in the Consumer Price Index registered in January 2008, an all-time high where setting the county's tax rates is concerned going back to the early '90s, according to Bill Vaselopulos, director of tax extension in the clerk's office.

The equalization factor, used to recalibrate property values statewide in the complex tax formula, was set by the Illinois Department of Revenue at 2.9786, up 4.75 percent and also an all-time high.

"The multiplier went up at a greater rate than the CPI," Vaselopulos pointed out. The Department of Revenue sets the multiplier "to achieve uniform property assessment throughout the state," according to a release announcing the new Cook multiplier in August.

Department spokeswoman Susan Hofer said it was designed to level assessments between counties so that, say, two identical houses across the street on Lake-Cook Road would be assessed at the same value.

"The value shouldn't be significantly different," she said. "It's an equalizer, not a multiplier."

Because of that, however, as well as higher assessments in the southern suburbs and the phasing out of the so-called 7 percent assessment cap, most taxing bodies will technically see their tax rates decline, as they'll require a smaller slice of a bigger pie. In Schaumburg Township, for instance, all school districts will see a lower tax rate for the 2008 year than 2007. The same goes for school districts in Barrington Township.

The rates are determined by the clerk as the figure needed to produce levy amounts requested by individual schools, parks, libraries, municipalities or other taxing districts.

In Cook's three-year, three-region cycle, this was the year the southern suburbs were reassessed. Many expected assessments to drop given falling property values, but over the full three years, that was not the case. South-suburban assessments actually rose, Vaselopulos said. That meant property owners in the Northern suburbs - generally north of North Avenue - and Chicago did not receive an unfair hit making up for reductions elsewhere, he said.

There are problems ahead, however, with the upcoming expiration of the 7 percent assessment cap. South-suburban homeowners were eligible for a $33,000 exemption this year. That was limited to $26,000 in the Northern suburbs and $20,000 in the city. Unless the General Assembly votes to extend it, that exemption will expire in the city next year and be trimmed to $20,000 in the northern suburbs and $26,000 in the southern region, then expire entirely for the northern suburbs the year after that and for the southern suburbs the year after that.

In exchange, the basic homeowner's exemption will rise from $5,000 to $6,000, but most homeowners will definitely see that increase their annual property taxes.

Next year, however, tax revenues may rise only 0.1 percent, based on the annual change in the CPI posted this January.

Aside from this year's CPI hike and reassessments, Vaselopulos said the only likely cause of surprising increases in a tax bill would be the passage of a local referendum.