Experts question Cook County assessor's COVID relief calculations

Experts have raised questions about a formula used by Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi to give homeowners a break due to pandemic-related unemployment, which a Chicago Sun-Times report said resulted in some high-profile businesses and residents benefiting.

Kaegi's office used its own neighborhood projections on job loss as opposed to relying on sale prices to determine the residential property value, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

For instance, Kaegi's office calculated that the low-income Chicago neighborhood of Greater Grand Crossing would see the same level of pandemic-related unemployment as the wealthy suburb of Winnetka. So residents of the Chicago neighborhood saw small increases in their taxes.

At the same time, the newspaper analysis showed Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lives in a growing North Side neighborhood, benefitted with a lower tax bill.

Unemployment projections aren't the sort of math Kaegi's agency ever did before. But Kaegi said he decided he needed to do something when it became clear within weeks of the March 2020 state-ordered shutdown in response to the pandemic that home values in Chicago and the suburbs were falling.

So that spring Kaegi had his staff recalculate the values placed by his agency on all 1.5 million homes in Cook County, cutting each of those assessments by a median of 10%.

That didn't mean everyone would end up paying less in taxes. Government taxing bodies still needed the same money to operate. So the amount of property taxes collected countywide wouldn't change.

But Kaegi's move affected every tax bill, resulting in lower tax bills for some homeowners, higher ones for others - and higher tax bills for most commercial buildings even though businesses were hard-hit by the pandemic, too.

"They took a gamble, and the gamble didn't turn out as they expected," Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a government watchdog group, told the newspaper. "A lot of the relief they gave was uneven and not where it was needed."

Kaegi's office blasted the newspaper analysis, saying it left out that more than 1.5 million residential and commercial properties "received a needed COVID adjustment during a life-threatening pandemic."

"The truth is, we issued COVID adjustments fairly, transparently, and by treating everyone equitably," Kaegi spokesman Scott Smith said in a statement emailed Sunday.

Kaegi also raised the assessment on his own Oak Park home, causing his tax bill to jump from $27,919 to $42,789.