Cook County’s property tax system is a Rubik’s Cube that even those relatively immersed in valuations and equalization factors value deciphering. So shame on the ordinary homeowners who have to pay the treasury twice a year.
All they know is that the fiscal cost of owning a home (you know, what we call the American dream) continues to grow at rates that seem unsustainable. And naturally they want to know who to blame.
One Cook County official, Assessor Fritz Kaegi, has already felt the public’s wrath, losing his Democratic primary re-election race to challenger Patrick Hynes. Kaegi, in many ways, was simply the messenger who was removed for being in a position directly related to property taxes when many Chicago homeowners received the bad news late last year that their taxes had skyrocketed due to the pandemic’s deflating effect on commercial property values.
So let Cook County’s ever-astute Treasurer Maria Pappas issue a full report less than two weeks after voters expressed their discontent at the polls, telling residents, in effect: “No, it’s not your imagination. Property taxes really are that bad.”
Pappas, who as treasurer has the unpleasant task of delivering bad news about property taxes directly to people’s mailboxes and thus could be vulnerable to suffering Kaegi’s fate in November when he runs for re-election, was able to confirm what angry residents suspected and at the same time tacitly say: I’m on your side.
Additionally, Pappas has an experienced and competent staff, and they were able to frame the horror of the property tax in a way that the average citizen can understand. Over the past three decades, according to their analysis, total property taxes in Cook County have increased at about twice the rate of inflation and considerably more than average wages. From 1995 to 2024, Cook County taxes increased nearly 182% to $19.2 billion from $6.8 billion, according to the study. Inflation during that period was 91%.
Those simple findings, in and of themselves, are as damning to our state and local governments as anything we can think of. They represent nothing less than an abject failure of governance.
Consider: In Chicago, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot proposed just a few years ago putting the city’s property tax on automatic, raising the tax each year by 5% or the rate of inflation, whichever was lower. That would have been far less than what county residents (or, for that matter, city homeowners) have experienced over the past 30 years. For city residents, the increase during that period has been 177%, to $1.8 billion in 2024, from $647 million in 1995.
Lightfoot’s policy was ended by Mayor Brandon Johnson, who had promised during his campaign not to raise property taxes and then proposed a $300 million increase, a 17% increase, by 2025. The City Council rejected that and closed the door on any property tax increase.
In his report, Pappas blames virtually every corner of Illinois state government. Their targets include some familiar ones, such as the overabundance of taxing bodies in the state, such as municipalities and various dark districts. In many parts of Cook County, there are so many government entities involved in the action that property tax bills look like grocery receipts.
School districts are a major source of bleeding property tax bills; For example, the relentless maximum property tax increases by the bloated Chicago Public Schools account for more than half of what Chicago homeowners pay.
But elsewhere in Cook County, school districts must turn to property taxes when the state doesn’t support public education to the level that most other states do.
The State is also culpable in other respects, regularly imposing unfunded mandates on local governments, which legally do not have the same range of revenue-raising options as the State. The most inexcusable of these mandates in recent times was Springfield’s sweetening of pension benefits for certain police officers and firefighters in Chicago in 2025.
While making the decision to sign that bill into law, adding $11 billion to the city of Chicago’s pre-existing mountain of pension obligations, a spokesperson for JB Pritzker said at the time that the governor “remains committed to maintaining fiscal discipline at all levels of government and looks forward to the city of Chicago implementing these changes with careful planning and fiscal discipline.”
How can a locality “implement” $11 billion in new obligations? Property taxes are pretty much the only way.
As we wrote at the time, Chicago taxpayers can thank Pritzker and Chicago state legislators, who voted unanimously in favor of the bill, when their property taxes inevitably rise to cover this enormous debt.
Speaking of which, the vast majority of the city of Chicago’s share of those property tax bills that had Chicagoans gnashing their teeth late last year is not paying for city services. It covers the pensions of city workers, both retired and current. And there is no relief in sight on that front, as the city’s four public pension funds remain abysmally underfunded, even after years of property tax increases to correct that financial problem.
Pappas’s study was titled “How State Laws Failed to Stop Decades of Skyrocketing Property Taxes: A Case for Reform.” But alternatively, it could have been labeled “Something’s Gotta Give.”
The moment of reckoning seems very close indeed.
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