Slowik: Kaegi pledges to help homeowners by making property assessments more open and fair

Time will tell what impact newly sworn Cook County Assessor Frederick “Fritz” Kaegi will have on high property tax bills in the south suburbs.

Assessments that determine the value of homes and business properties are one part of a complex real-estate tax system. For too long, many Southland residents have been hurt by a rigged system, Kaegi said Monday during a swearing-in ceremony at Kenwood Academy in Chicago.

“This office has been organized to deliver favors to a small handful of winners at the expense of the rest of us,” Kaegi said in a speech. “It’s an approach that is an out-of-date relic of urban machine patronage politics, completely idiosyncratic to Cook County. No other place is like this.”

Kaegi positioned himself as a reformer and political outsider when he campaigned for assessor.

“This doesn’t happen all the time in politics, where someone comes out of nowhere and runs a campaign based on ideas,” Chicago business consultant Dan Seals, a fellow Kenwood alumnus, said while introducing Kaegi.

Kaegi defeated incumbent Joseph Berrios, then-chair of the Cook County Democratic Party in the March primary by more than 80,000 votes. “The Tax Divide,” a Chicago Tribune investigative series that debuted in June 2017, undoubtedly affected the race for assessor.

The series detailed how Cook County’s assessment system “harmed the poor and helped the rich.” It also laid bare connections among the tax system and powerful Democratic politicians.

“(Berrios) controls three active campaign funds where he’s raised more than $5 million since 2009, more than half of which came from property tax attorneys and the businesses associated with them,” the series reported. “Among his strongest allies: Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and (Chicago) Ald. Edward Burke, both property tax lawyers who benefit from the county’s broken system.”

Federal authorities last week raided the offices of Burke and placed brown paper over windows as agents apparently seized records. The scope of the apparent investigation is unknown.

Kaegi has pledged to make the assessor’s office ethical, transparent and fair.

“I will eliminate the culture of pay-to-play in this office and will never accept donations from the property tax appeals industry,” he said Monday.

He addressed students attending the ceremony at his high school alma mater near his childhood home in Hyde Park.

“About two-thirds of property taxes fund our public schools,” Kaegi said. “When we talk about fixing the assessment system, what’s at stake is nothing less than our children’s education.

“You see, my job — property assessment — really is about how we divide up the bill for investing in you,” he told students. “We cannot afford to allow our assessment system to be hijacked for purposes of favoritism and profit, because that gives folks an excuse for not investing in you.”

Kaegi, 47, of Oak Park, has aligned himself with reform-minded Democrats. During the primary, he appeared at campaign events with Marie Newman, a progressive who almost upset incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski in the 3^rd District. He advocated for a progressive income tax in Illinois, a position also supported by Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker.

Kaegi acknowledged Democratic elected officials who were in the audience Monday. Among his supporters were newly retired Cook County Clerk David Orr; U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Matteson; Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx; state Sen. Toi Hutchinson, D-Olympia Fields; and Hazel Crest Mayor Vernard Alsberry.

Some of Kaegi’s impact is immediate. He ousted relatives and close friends of Berrios who were on the payroll of the assessor’s office and funded by taxpayers.

“This morning, we ended the employment of anyone in our office who received his or her job purely due to patronage or nepotism,” Kaegi told the Kenwood audience.

Other impacts will be felt in the short term. Kaegi released a plan for his first 100 days in office and highlighted parts of the plan in his speech.

“In our first 100 days, we will not only make publicly available our data and methodologies, we will reveal our models and open our programming code up for inspection by anyone who wishes to view it,” Kaegi said.

Adopting industry standards and best practices will improve transparency and fairness for residential assessments, Kaegi said. He said he’ll work with lawmakers to introduce legislation to address concerns about how commercial properties are assessed.

“The bill would require commercial property owners to submit income data each year, like our peers in other major markets in the U.S. and as property owners do when they file appeals,” Kaegi said.

Increasing transparency, improving fairness in the tax system and demanding ethical behavior by public servants sounds like good government. Kaegi seems like a realist, though. If those goals could easily be accomplished, every elected official would achieve them.

“There are folks out there who profit from a broken, opaque, antique system,” Kaegi said. “There are folks out there who need cronyism as an economic advantage, because otherwise they can’t compete on their own merits.

“Some will try to bog us down, to undermine the changes we make,” he said. “Some will want to starve this office and prevent it from functioning. But the powers behind those interests have never been weaker than they are right now.”

Kaegi cannot single-handedly lower tax bills overnight. South suburban residents should hold their local municipal and school officials accountable for costs, to help address high tax rates in the region. The Southland needs to attract additional investment in commercial and industrial developments.

If successful, Kaegi’s proposals to improve fairness in Cook County’s assessment system should help level the playing field for Southland residents.