Cook County assessor favorite Patrick Hynes vows ‘stability,’ detente with appeals board

In 2020, Patrick Hynes walked out of the Cook County assessor’s office, frustrated, he said, with then-boss Fritz Kaegi’s leadership. In March, he ousted Kaegi in the Democratic primary. In December, he expects to return to the office as its leader.

Hynes, the Democratic nominee, is heavily favored on Nov. 3 over Libertarian Nico Tsatsoulis, who ran unsuccessfully for assessor in 2022 and for a seat on the county Board of Review in 2024. No Republican is on the ballot.

The assessor oversees the office that sets the value of each of the county’s 1.8 million parcels, a fundamental calculation that helps determine what owners ultimately pay in property taxes.

Hynes promises “stability” after years of record assessment increases, which Kaegi attributed to a hot housing market and efforts to correct years of undervaluing big business buildings under his predecessor.

Hynes’ plans to offer developers custom estimates of their likely assessments and to ease tensions with the Board of Review would mark a sharp break. Kaegi’s two terms have been defined by conflict with commercial property owners and with the board, which often reversed his office’s valuations on appeal.

“I think that everyone is ready for a turn of the page. I think people are pretty exhausted by that kind of public animosity,” Hynes said, “and it’s not productive, so why do it?”

Hynes suggested he would stop sending staff to the Board of Review to fight appeals in person, a strategy Kaegi relied on this year to aggressively contest what he called “lowball” appeals by data center owners. A county-commissioned report in late 2024 had encouraged the assessor to present evidence at the board to justify the office’s numbers, including preparing “hearing packets” with its methodology and supporting data. Kaegi went as far as ordering up his own appraisals.

“We’ll send information as requested to the board,” Hynes said. “I don’t know that we need to be adversarial, where I send someone down there and say, ‘We’re just here to make sure that you don’t make any changes to my book.'”

Hynes started as a field inspector in the assessor’s office in 1998, and then rose through the ranks. After leaving, he was elected Lyons Township assessor, running unopposed in 2021 and getting reelected in 2025.

Hynes defeated his old boss in the primary by almost 26,000 votes — 52% to 48% — thanks largely to help from trade unions, including Operating Engineers Local 150, LiUNA Chicago and Electrical Workers Local 134, as well as business interests long frustrated by Kaegi’s approach.

If he wins, he would be the second Hynes to run the office. His uncle, Thomas C. Hynes, was county assessor from 1979 to 1997, as well as Illinois Senate president and 19th Ward Democratic committeeman. His cousin Dan Hynes, a former state comptroller, was a deputy governor under Gov. JB Pritzker, and another cousin, Matt Hynes, worked for former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Unions that rely on construction jobs have contributed more than $1 million to Hynes since he launched his campaign, including in the months since he won the primary, according to state campaign finance records. A mix of wealthy Chicagoans and business groups gave more than $500,000 over the same span. Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers, one of Kaegi’s harshest critics, gave Hynes $10,000 shortly before the primary. Property tax attorneys and their families or firms, including Worsek & Vihon, Flanagan Bilton and Schiller Law, gave more than $130,000 combined.

While each individually stayed within the county’s $1,500 campaign contribution cap for people doing business with the county or “seeking official action” from it, Kaegi suggested it was evidence attorneys believed Hynes would return the office to the days of undervaluing trophy buildings.

Kaegi, a former mutual fund portfolio manager and analyst who took office in late 2018, refused donations from property tax attorneys and largely financed his own campaign. He said that money fed a pay-to-play culture under his predecessor, Joe Berrios. That too-cozy relationship, Kaegi argued, led to systemic undervaluing of commercial properties at the expense of homeowners — especially in lower-value homes. A Tribune investigation in 2017 found that aside from being assessed too low, many commercial valuations went untouched for years under Berrios.

In office, Kaegi pushed to raise assessments on large commercial buildings to correct years of undervaluation, but the Board of Review often overruled him on appeal, and its members disputed his methods.

Hynes, clearly the business community’s choice, bristled during the campaign at any suggestion he would bring back the Berrios era and denied the contributions would affect his work as assessor. In a January session with the Tribune Editorial Board, he said Berrios “had no earthly idea what he was doing.”

His signature pledge is an appeal to big developers. Hynes plans to create an office that would estimate a proposed project’s future assessment and, in turn, its likely tax bill. That certainty, he said, would spur local investment, eventually broadening the county’s tax base and lowering bills.

That’s the long-term hope for Farzin Parang, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago, which gave Hynes’ campaign $50,000.

“Our property tax system has crossed that line into becoming a barrier to economic growth,” he said. “It hurts everybody.”

“(Kaegi) blames downtown commercial property for the challenges in residential; I think that’s a horrible disservice to the public, and I think already Pat Hynes doesn’t view it that way. He doesn’t view it as a zero-sum game, and let’s just find the person to blame the most that helps my political rhetoric,” Parang said.

Commercial developers can expect “boring predictability and some definitive answers on how we’re going to score their properties so they can, with confidence, attract equity to our market and underwrite their commercial loans to start swinging hammers,” Hynes told the Tribune this month. He said he wants to explore charging a fee for the service, which would need county approval.

How he manages to shift enough workers into that new economic development office while keeping up with the rolling assessment calendar and upgrading the county’s aging property record cards — the basic descriptions of homes and other buildings that he often described as “garbage” — is uncertain.

Kaegi’s office estimates there will be fewer than 10 vacancies to fill by year’s end. Though critical of Kaegi’s leadership, Hynes said he would not clean house the way Kaegi did back in 2018 when he replaced all but one of Berrios’ top executives shortly after being sworn in. He said he intends to keep Kaegi’s data team and “quite a few” senior officials and knows some 200 employees who were colleagues when he worked there.

“Now there was, I believe, a mandate for change, and there will be change coming, but I don’t think that necessarily means that the actual faces and the people that are in the seats have to change,” he said.

The new assessor will take office as the south suburban reassessment wraps up, then pivot to tackling the most complex cycle: the city of Chicago. Hynes was a fierce critic of the last city reassessment, which sent valuations, and later tax bills, sharply higher for homeowners in many South and West Side neighborhoods, a change that fueled endorsements for Hynes from local elected officials, including former U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, who had been a Kaegi ally.

Kaegi defended those values as reflecting outside investor interest in those neighborhoods, and said they would not have been as harsh had the Board of Review not granted such steep reductions. Asked whether those neighborhood values would come down, Hynes hedged.

“We’ll see what the data shows,” he said. “Yeah, some will, some won’t. But I think that the stability is going to go a long way. It’s the unpredictability that upsets the apple cart.”

He also promised a better system to handle “certificates of error,” a bill correction issued by the assessor that typically comes with a refund from the treasurer. A certificate backlog built up during upgrades to the county’s property tax system. Kaegi’s office paused processing them between March and October 2025 and has been working through the backlog since then, spokesman Christian Belanger said. He expects most of it will be cleared by December when Kaegi leaves office.

Hynes said he would start a new tracking system to follow applications “from birth to death … if it hasn’t had an action item on it in four months, that should raise a red flag to someone.”

Hynes opposes an unfinished Kaegi initiative in which he has asked Springfield for permission to automatically renew the so-called “senior freeze” unless the office “tighten(s) up our game.”

The exemption holds assessments steady for some lower-income seniors to protect them from gentrification or rapidly rising values. Kaegi argued elderly applicants shouldn’t have to reapply if state records could establish eligibility. A county inspector general audit of a small number of applications found that the assessor’s office lacked “adequate internal controls” to properly administer the program and failed to produce application records or confirm income and ownership, which “materially increases the risk that exemptions are granted to ineligible applicants.”

Kaegi’s office said it was following state statute, but would institute new processes to verify income using state data, had already upgraded its recordkeeping system and would keep pursuing back taxes from anyone who improperly received the exemption.

Tsatsoulis, 61, is a property manager originally from Greece who lives in Hyde Park. He lost to Kaegi in the 2022 general election with just under 18% of the vote. In 2024, he ran against Rogers for the Board of Review and won 14%.

He has not created a fundraising committee because he takes “no donations from anyone … unlike my opponent,” Tsatsoulis said. Tsatsoulis added that Hynes’ willingness to take money from property tax attorneys is “completely unacceptable.”

He is campaigning on two main planks: abolishing special tax increment financing, or TIF districts, and overhauling the county’s property tax system to resemble California’s.

California voters adopted Proposition 13 in 1978. It caps property taxes at 1% of assessed value and limits assessment hikes to no more than 2% a year, with properties reassessed at market value only when they are sold.

Both changes would significantly upend how taxes are collected locally, limit how much local governments can raise and require changes to state law. Tsatsoulis told the Tribune the benefits to residents of gentrifying areas and to seniors outweigh the drawbacks.

aquig@chicagotribune.com