by The Daily Herald Editorial Board
The political dust-up on the Cook County Board of Review is a travesty of partisan bullying, but it is also more than that. It is at its source a vivid depiction of defects in Illinois' and Cook County's property assessment system that are so fundamental and far-reaching they demand urgent and concentrated attention.
In the Cook County case, the two Democrats on the three-person Board of Review that investigates property tax assessment appeals took all but one of 11 newly authorized positions for themselves. In the process, they rejected a proposal from the Republican commissioner -- Dan Patlak of Wheeling -- that would have created parity in the distribution and pay of the new hires.
The very fact that the Cook County Board saw the board's need for substantially more help to manage a four-year backlog of appeals -- and knew it could be paid for out of increased fees placed on lawyers handling the appeals -- is a tacit acknowledgment that the property tax appeals process in Illinois, and especially Cook County, is essentially a cottage industry for legal work.
During his successful campaign for assessor, Democrat Fritz Kaegi, who was inaugurated in December, noted that the volume of appeals filed against Cook County property assessments was as high as 25 percent. By some estimates, appeals of Cook County assessments win on the first try more than 50 percent of the time, a rate that can reach even higher when rejections are appealed. A Chicago Tribune ProPublica joint report in December 2017 demonstrated how manipulations of the state's property tax system often siphon property tax burdens away from wealthy commercial and residential taxpayers and put them on the backs of small businesses and the poor.
No system of estimating property values will be foolproof. Some complaints are bound to be raised by people and businesses who believe they have been treated inconsistently or unfairly, and some small number of those appeals might expect to succeed. But in Cook and virtually any collar county in Illinois, the numbers show that it is all but crazy not to appeal.
Any process that produces this level of frustration and dispute is clearly rotten at its core and needs wholesale review and reform.
Kaegi announced political reforms in the Cook County Assessor's Office that are surely welcome, and he proposed the legislature demand greater accountability from commercial interests that appeal. Elsewhere, numerous calls have been raised for lawmakers to prohibit politicians who are lawyers from doing work on property tax-appeals cases.
All these are reasonable places to start. But in general, they address only symptoms of the chronic faults in the state's property assessment system. The fact that the Cook County Board of Review needs at least 11 additional employees -- the county authorized five more if enough fees are collected to support them -- just to try to make a dent in a four-year backlog of appeals is by itself an indictment of the entire process. Lawmakers who care about property tax reform acknowledge that, then look beyond mere blemishes and address the entire corrupt and unfair system.