On July 20, Cook County clerk David Orr brought reporters to his office for the annual unveiling of the county’s tax rates. According to Bill Vaselopulos, Orr’s chief financial aide, this year’s tax rate is (drumroll, please) 5.98 percent, down from last year’s rate of 6.28 percent. As Vaselopulos patiently plowed his way through a glossary of mind-numbing tax law definitions, reporters pored through a thick press release, searching for the elusive answer to the question on everyone’s mind: How much were taxpayers going to be stuck for come July 31, when the second installment of the annual tax bill comes out?
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Alas, as with every aspect of our property taxes, that’s not so easy to figure. “It is,” Vaselopulos noted with a wry smile, “a complicated system.” The tax rate is just the final piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle that takes months to assemble. Months before it’s determined, each of the county’s taxing bodies–the city, the county, the schools, the parks, the libraries, the Water Reclamation District, etc–figures out what it needs to spend (or levy, to use the tax man’s term) in the coming year (they can’t ask for the sky because most of them are bound by state law not to raise their spending by more than the rate of inflation, currently 3.3 percent). The county assessor’s office tells the county clerk how much in assessable property value is available for taxation, and Orr’s office divides the levy into the total property value to determine the tax rate. If the assessable property value rises, Orr’s office can lower the tax rate and still increase the amount of money taxpayers have to pay. This is nirvana for politicians such as Mayor Daley, the aldermen, and the commissioners of the Cook County Board, who get to brag about holding the line on taxes even as taxes rise.
Except that in 1970 local reps at the state’s constitutional convention insisted that it was unfair to make ordinary Cook County home owners pay at the full value of their property. So they fought for home rule authority that would allow them to set the assessable value of residential property in Cook County at no more than 16 percent of fair market value. Applying this formula to Madigan’s property, you multiply $180,975 by 16 percent, getting an assessable value of $28,956, which is then multiplied by the current tax rate of 5.98 percent. So the speaker’s on the hook for $1,732 in property taxes, right?
In July the state’s Department of Revenue raised the equalizer from 2.5754 to 2.7320, in part, the department announced, because the board of review doled out so many decreased assessments. “Only a mope doesn’t appeal,” the commercial property owner adds. “You gotta figure that the goddamn equalizer’s eventually gonna make you pay for the tax breaks everyone else gets from the review board.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Paul Dolan.
