Property owners on the North and Northwest Sides of Chicago will find lower 1987 tax bills in their mailboxes starting this week, but most South Side, Southwest Side and suburban taxpayers will be paying more this year under new tax rates released Wednesday.
Cook County Clerk Stanley Kusper said the tax rate in Chicago dropped 6.68 percent, to $9.66 per $100 of assessed valuation.
It is the first drop in the city rate since 1985, according to Barbara Gorell, whose county tax extension division figured the new tax rates from the funding requests of local governments.
But the lower rate will be offset for many South Side taxpayers by higher assessed property values. Property in the southern half of Chicago, including the Loop and sections of the West Side, was reassessed last year, rising in value an average of 23.8 percent, according to Dolores Cesario of the Cook County tax assessor`s office.
Most suburban property owners also will face increases in their tax bills, as the higher demands for funds by many villages, school districts and other taxing bodies run into a stagnant property tax base, Kusper said.
”The real culprit this year is the lack of growth in suburban Cook assessed valuation,” Kusper said.
Sizable increases in the assessed value of Loop property were a key factor in the overall Cook County assessment increase of 8.9 percent last year, according to Kusper`s figures. But the suburbs saw only a 3.45 percent increase in their assessed value. By comparison, the city of Chicago, half of which was reassessed last year, had a 16.64 percent increase in property values.
That increase in the tax base was the major reason for the lower city tax rate, Kusper said.
Cook County property is reassessed on a quadrennial cycle, in which the south and north sections of the city and suburbs are each reassessed in turn. The system was devised by Cook County Democratic politicans to help them in election years. This year they hope to benefit politically from a lower city tax rate while mostly Republican suburban residents face higher taxe rates.
As the result of the new rate, the owner of a Chicago home with a fair market value of $50,000 will pay $44.89 less than last year, or $1,123.75. The owner of a $100,000 home will pay $2,585.60, or $113.99 less. Residential property is assessed at 16 percent of its estimated market value.
”Half the city will see bills go down,” said Toni Hartrich, executive director of the Civic Federation. Overall, tax bills ”will go down 4 percent in the city,” she said, taking into account the reassessments and this year`s slightly higher multiplier. The multiplier is a figure applied by the state to county tax assessments to equalize assessments across the state.
But ”people ought to be aware there will be a massive impact on the south” half of the city, Hartrich said.
The increases in assessed valuation there resulted from ”a lot of growth and construction” in the area, she said. Though individuals in the area will face higher bills this year, she said, industrial and commercial property owners, who are assessed for tax purposes at 38 and 39 percent of the market value of their property respectively, will bear the brunt of the increase.
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Kusper said property tax bills will be sent out starting Thursday and the last of them should be received by July 30. Taxes will be due Aug. 30-five days earlier than the Sept. 4 penalty date last year.
The earlier deadline means the more than 700 county taxing districts will save $500,000 a day in interest expenses on funds they borrow in advance of receiving the tax dollars, Kusper said. The taxing districts always receive their funding a year late and must borrow to continue operating until the funds come in the following year, he said.
Hardest hit by tax rates again this year were sections of the poorer southern suburbs, including Chicago Heights, Harvey, Markham and Ford Heights, which had the highest overall rates.
The part of Chicago Heights that is in School District 163, Rich Township High School District 227, the park district and the Thorn Creek Basin Sanitary District led the pack with a $15.723 tax rate. The portion of Niles in School District 71 that benefits from a large industrial and commercial tax base had the lowest rate at $5.586.
The new tax rates mirror a trend among Chicago`s poorer suburbs, especially those with large minority populations.
Suburbs like Ford Heights, Markham, and Harvey now have sections of town with higher tax rates than can be found in well-to-do communities like Evanston and Oak Park, which have long imposed high taxes as a matter of choice, with voters electing to spend extra for first-class schools and other amenities.
But less wealthy communities like Chicago Heights and Maywood are now being forced to tax themselves at rates in excess of $13 per $100 of assessed valuation. They are increasingly trapped, experts say, between a tax base eroded by factory closings and housing abandonment and an influx of poor families who require more government services.
The higher taxes in many suburbs also are a reflection of ”state aid drying up” to schools and other local government bodies, Hartrich said.
Kusper, too, attributed the increased demand for property tax dollars to factors other than excessive spending by taxing bodies, though he noted that the county is approaching a hefty $4 billion in total taxation.
”Nothing in life seems to get any cheaper,” he said, maintaining that the increases for most suburbs are ”reasonable rates of growth” and that some of the tax increases were ”self-inflicted” by voters who chose to pay more for schools or libraries.
Though tax bills will be down for many Chicagoans this year, Hartrich warned that increases are ahead, particularly if the city gets the $116 million budget increase it is seeking. The city, which will collect $512 million from this year`s taxes, wants $628 next year, said Ronald Picur, city comptroller.
The reassessment of North and Northwest Side properties going on this year will help hold down the city tax rate next year.