Some Cook County tax bills still manage to rise

Joel Marks of Mount Prospect couldn't wait to receive his second-installment Cook County property-tax bill in the mail. So he checked out his bill online only to be shocked with what turned out to be a 19 percent increase from last year.

“I didn't expect my property-tax bill to be going up 20 percent,” Marks said, adding that he calculates he's paying 145 percent of what he was only six years ago, an increase of about 50 percent.

Like many homeowners receiving their tax bills, mailed out earlier this week, Marks was confounded at how his bill could rise given a lowered assessment and what Bill Vaselopulos of the county clerk's office called “very nominal increases” across the board in county tax revenues.

“Taxing districts are not receiving that much more money this year,” Vaselopulos said, citing the 0.1 percent limit placed on increases by the inflation rate reflected in the Consumer Price Index last year.

Because the 1,500 different overlapping taxing districts across the county create about 2,500 different possible variations for individual tax bills most of those in the suburbs Vaselopulos said, “To make a generalization is very hard.” Yet revenue rose only 0.36 percent in Chicago and about 2.5 percent across suburban Cook, so all things being equal the average suburban homeowner should see a 2.5 percent increase in this year's overall tax levy.

“If all things were equal, yes,” Vaselopulos granted, “but unfortunately all things aren't equal.”

For one thing, the Illinois Department of Revenue set a record-high multiplier of 3.3701 to bring Cook assessments in line with the rest of the state, up more than 13 percent from last year. For another, while the General Assembly extended the so-called 7 percent homeowners exemption, it did so simply by creating additional steps in phasing it out. Homeowners in Chicago and north-suburban Cook, above North Avenue, can have a maximum of $20,000 trimmed from their assessed value this year, then 16 percent and 12 percent in following years. South-suburban Cook is at 26 percent this year, then will follow the same path in years to come.

“That is starting to sunset,” Vaselopulos said. “What we're seeing now is that value is starting eventually to come back onto those properties.”

Yet these are increases everyone is facing. In what appears to be a zero-sum game, how are some homeowners seeing dramatic increases in their tax bills? Most everyone agrees it stems from the record 430,000 assessment appeals heard this year at the Cook County Board of Review almost a quarter of the county's 1.8 million properties.

“Your increases or decreases are due to everyone else's increases or decreases,” Vaselopulos said. “When someone's tax bill goes down, someone else's goes up. ... If another individual didn't get a reduction or didn't attempt to get a reduction, they may be paying a little higher because someone else is paying a little lower.”

Marks said his assessed value actually went down this year about $2,500 to just under $34,000. A quick scan of the Mount Prospect tax rates for Elk Grove Township showed no drastic increases in tax rates, although the village rate did rise 3 percent.

So Marks said he must be paying more because others are paying less. A quick look at the top 300 reductions granted by the Board of Review this year, as compiled by failed Cook assessor candidate Forrest Claypool, turned up a $5.9 million reduction for a United Airlines property in Mount Prospect. Claypool argued that big reductions like that, granted by Board of Review Commissioner Joseph Berrios, now the assessor-elect, were shifting the tax burden to homeowners.

“I think Claypool was right,” Marks said.

Vaselopulos said that's creating a system in which all property owners are basically compelled to seek reductions in their assessments. “The appeals process has been championed by the Board of Review for many years,” he added. “They're encouraging it.”

Berrios, for instance, in trying to appeal to homeowners, boasted during the campaign that the board was granting reductions on 80 percent of appeals filed by homeowners.

“It's always advantageous to appeal,” Vaselopulos said. “I don't think that the Board of Review has ever increased an assessment on appeal.”

Yet that may be changing. Timothy Evans, chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, said in appointing a replacement for Berrios he'll be looking for someone fair and unbiased, and who would decrease or increase an assessment on appeal depending on what the fair market value was set at.

Incoming suburban Board of Review Commissioner Dan Patlak, Republican Wheeling Township assessor, who previously worked in the office under Maureen Murphy, said he didn't think homeowners should feel compelled to appeal. “I would say people should seek assessment reductions if they think they're overassessed,” he said. “When I worked at the Board of Review and I was there eight years we used what I thought was pretty fair criteria. I didn't think we were too liberal” in granting reductions.

For now, however, the only way a property owner can attempt to cut property taxes is by filing an assessment appeal and it's already too late for the tax bills being delivered now.