The heated race for Cook County Assessor is a case study in Chicago-style politics. Fritz Kaegi, the reform-minded incumbent left a mess to clean up by his predecessor, faces a challenge from Kari Steele, a politically connected commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which manages sewage treatment and flood mitigation. (Steele’s campaign did not respond to repeated interview requests.)
The appraiser’s job is not one most people dream of, unless you like to determine the value of nearly two million parcels of land in Cook County. add to that all repairs needed to fix a broken system left behind by Joe Berrios, who hired family members to work for the board, accepted excessive donations from property tax appeals attorneys, and disproportionately taxed homeowners in poor communities on wealthy and politically connected developers.
That is the system that Kaegi says he inherited in 2018 after Berríos’ removal. He sat with him Reader to talk about the changes he’s made since then and to explain why Cook County voters should give him another chance.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Kelly Garcia: What does the Cook County Assessor do?
Fritz Kaegi: It provides how we’ve split the government cost bill over here. In Chicago, there is between $7.25 and $7.5 billion in property taxes that must be collected each year.
We found out how we split that bill among all the people who own property in Cook County. So it’s really an office that’s about fairness. How we split that bill depends on our estimates of the market value of each person’s property. And the key is that the greatest building owners are like the person at a dinner party who ordered a 40-ounce steak and lots of fixings, and we compare them to the person who just ordered an appetizer or a salad. How are you dividing the bill between them?
The key to evaluating how an appraiser is doing is to make sure you estimate the market value of all those properties fairly and accurately, without bias or favoritism, so you don’t shift the burden from one group to another. That’s the most important thing this office does.
Pilsen and Little Village residents often tell me they face a higher property tax burden, which is excluding them from the community. How are you approaching this?
I think the biggest inequity in the system is that under my predecessor and for years before that, big buildings were undervalued, so people who lived in Pilsen and Little Village footed the bill for them.
The gold standard in our industry analyzed the commercial transactions that occurred in 2018, [which was] the year before we took office. He found countywide that commercial properties were undervalued by 40 percent, and in Chicago, it was 50 percent, with that undervalue increasing as the building got larger. So basically, small commercial properties in places like Pilsen and Little Village tended to be valued closer to the mark, and larger properties were vastly undervalued. So those small commercial properties were footing the bill for the big downtown buildings, as were homeowners in Pilsen and Little Village.
Now, I think there’s another part that I have less control over and people might want to blame me for, which is when gentrification increases property values. And eventually the appraisal system catches up if we’re doing our job, because you don’t want to systematically undervalue some properties because then you’d be passing the bill to others, to people who live in neighborhoods where prices haven’t been going up.
But we are not a gentrification engine, we just catch up with the gentrification that has already happened. What we can do to mitigate that is make sure everyone gets their [property tax] exemption. We’ve really given a big boost to people over 65 whose income is less than $65,000 a year. They can get the senior freeze, which basically locks their appraisal in place.
The comprehensive affordable housing bill will go into effect this year and will incentivize the renovation and construction of affordable housing that is tied to people’s income, rather than market rents. Because gentrification really puts a lot of pressure on tenants.
What have you accomplished in your first term?
Last year marked the first time in nearly a decade that the average Chicago homeowner saw their property tax bill drop. Last year there was a 1 percent reduction in the owners’ share of the burden, and now we’re talking 9 percent with this reassessment. [Editor’s note: one-third of properties in Cook County have their taxes reassessed each year; in 2021, properties in Chicago were that third.]
We’re also proud of the fact that countywide homeowners’ property taxes increased by only 1 percent each of the last two years, which actually held back much higher growth than had been seen in the previous two decades.
In the first year we submitted our evaluations, the gold standard in our field found that they were within industry standards for accuracy and fairness for the first time in our office’s history.
We also replaced the 40 year old computer program that was the backbone of our system. In 2020, we implemented an online appeals system and an online waivers system. In 2021 we replace the backbone of the system; that has allowed other gains such as the automatic renewal of the exemption for the elderly.
We’re winning awards for these things. This office hasn’t won any awards before. We won awards from the International Association of Assessment Officers for our public outreach during the pandemic. We win awards from the National Association of Counties for the digital tools we create.
For a long time, this position was a source of mistrust, inequality and corruption, as it was used as a platform for favoritism, nepotism and the punishment of political enemies. On day one, I put in place an ethics order that prohibits conflicts of interest and requires extensive disclosures from our employees. It makes me the first appraiser in the history of this office to not accept donations from property tax appeals attorneys and appraisers who practice before us.
Why is he running for re-election?
The work we’re doing will be keeping more resources in neighborhoods with average people, and we can continue to make progress on that. Keeping money in neighborhoods where it should never have gone is very important not only to the health of our neighborhoods, but to people’s livelihoods and incomes.
That’s why it’s significant, and we can’t go back to the way it was. East [2021] reassessment in Chicago is on track to keep more than $600 million a year in our neighborhoods. But all of that could be reversed if he brings favoritism back to this office. The enemies of the reforms I’ve been implementing are backing my opponent: the big building owners club, the tax attorneys, the people who worked for Joe Berrios, those people, they want this office broken up again, and we can’t go back to it’s. There is too much at stake.
The work we have done has only been possible thanks to the public mandate. They were the ones who made it possible. That mandate brought me to this office, and I’ve been delivering that message. And that’s how we’re bringing about change: we go into every room, we talk to everyone, even people who may not have been with us to bring this forward, and we’re winning people over. And with the support of the public, we can do it again for four more years.