Fritz Kaegi defends record as Cook County assessor, calls for more reform in last budget hearing

Outgoing Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi used his final county budget hearing Tuesday to defend his record, tout his accomplishments and call for his replacement to pick up the baton on several unresolved reforms.

Kaegi lost the March primary to Patrick Hynes, the Lyons Township assessor who is favored to prevail in the November general election against Libertarian candidate Nico Tsatsoulis.

In particular, Kaegi on Tuesday said it’s “not adversarial” for him to to directly defend his property assessments at the county Board of Review.

Hynes has said his relationship with the board — a quasi-judicial, three-member board that hears appeals to the assessor’s valuations — would be less adversarial than Kaegi’s. Kaegi has regularly butted heads with board members over their appeals, which often overturned his valuations of big business buildings.

Kaegi said their decisions unfairly burdened homeowners, but the board argued Kaegi aimed too high.

While Hynes has said he will continue Kaegi’s recent practice of sending packets to the board with details about his own numbers, Hynes suggested he would back off Kaegi’s more direct defense tactics, which included creating a small team to conduct its own appraisals and show up in person at board meetings to back up their findings.

“This is an everyday function of assessment systems in the rest of Illinois and across the U.S.,” Kaegi told county commissioners of those defenses, which he noted were a recommendation of a recent county-commissioned report about how to improve the operations of both the assessor and the board.

Kaegi also defended his office’s big business numbers, pointing out the state’s Department of Revenue found the assessor was on target when it conducted its own “sales ratio studies” comparing sales prices of buildings against the assessor’s figures.

The county also is set to more regularly perform its own sales ratio studies of numbers from the assessor’s office and the board, one of several reforms Kaegi said the county should maintain.

The board and assessor also have reached rapprochement on a key calculation known as the capitalization rate. Their lengthy disagreement about that calculation helped contribute to the vastly different values of commercial buildings. The process for reaching agreement, Kaegi said, will mean “even fewer fluctuations in values coming out of the two offices” going forward.

“It’s taken us eight years to get there, but I feel that that is an enormously significant thing,” Commissioner Scott Britton said, also crediting Kaegi with making ethics changes that tamped down on the perception of “pay to play” in the office.

Besides creating a public visitor’s log, swearing off nepotism and barring campaign contributions from property tax appeals attorneys, Kaegi in 2022 also brought the office into compliance with Shakman principles, which guide hiring to ensure that workers aren’t brought on because of their political connections.

He called for his successor to take up other reforms in the General Assembly, including allowing automatic renewal of “senior freeze” eligibility — which helps prevent low-income homeowners from being walloped by big assessment hikes — and a bill requiring big building owners to share certain data about their property’s physical characteristics. The latter was intended to make it easier for Kaegi to value those buildings, but never got out of committee.

Kaegi also called for Springfield to take up property tax reforms to ensure data centers “pay their fair share.”

A Tribune and Illinois Answers Project investigation found data center appeals often left out the value of expensive systems such as backup power generators and chillers. Attorneys argued those not-permanent fixtures didn’t qualify as property.

The investigation highlighted another issue Kaegi said should be confronted: Governments, including schools, reaching settlements with high-value property owners to avoid making bigger payments if appeals at the state’s Property Tax Appeal Board, or PTAB, grants reductions. Kaegi has called for the abolition of PTAB, referring to it as a “ticking time bomb” that gets worse every year.

aquig@chicagotribune.com