The 64-page document released Thursday by the Lake County clerk’s office contains some good news for property owners.
The listing of the 1996 tax rates for Lake County’s 52 municipalities and 18 townships show the tax cap is helping to hold taxes down.
“It was almost boring this year,” said Wayne J. Wasylko, a senior executive in the tax extension department of the clerk’s office, which computes the new rates each year.
“Everything seems to be just muddling along,” he said. “With the tax cap, the rates are remaining consistent, or even dropping a little bit, unless there has been a voter-approved referendum.”
Residents will begin receiving tax bills during the first week of May. The first installments are due June 5.
Yet those static tax rates aren’t good news for everybody, especially cash-starved school districts whose pleas for more money are frequently rebuffed by voters.
The 6-year-old tax cap requires schools and other taxing bodies to get approval from voters before they raise more revenue by increasing their tax levy.
Because so many homeowners are fed up with their property tax bills–even if they remain stable–it’s often difficult to get referendums passed.
In Libertyville, for instance, voters in High School District 128 won’t see their tax bills going up dramatically because they rejected a school referendum last year.
But the local high school might start looking a little ragged.
School administrators wanted the extra funds–about $32 for the owner of a $150,000 home–for routine repairs, like replacing the school’s boiler and updating the fire-alarm system.
Now, they’re looking for ways to make the repairs on a shoestring.
“We’re doing probably Band-Aid repairs, rather than fixing the situation,” said Ken Wierschem, the district’s interim business manager.
The district has two buildings on its campus, a main high school built in 1954 and a building constructed in 1916 that houses part of the freshman program.
“People may be putting off that (repair) cost now, but it’s going to cost more in the future,” said Donald Gossett, the district’s superintendent.
The tax cap limits bodies such as non-home rule municipalities, schools, parks and library districts to levy increases of 5 percent, or the consumer price index, whichever is lower.
This year, the tax cap was set at 2.5 percent over last year’s rate. The increase compares with a 2.7 percent hike the previous two years and 2.9 percent in 1993.
Municipal governments in home-rule communities such as Buffalo Grove, Deerfield, Highland Park, Lincolnshire, Mettawa, North Chicago and Waukegan are not affected.
Before the 1991 implementation of the tax cap, formally known as the Property Tax Extension Limitation Act, residents in Lake County regularly received double-digit hikes in their tax bills.
The year before the tax cap took effect, tax bills went up an average of 15.4 percent in Lake County. The year before that, tax bills increased 18.1 percent.
Taxes are also kept low by Lake County’s building boom.
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During 1996, an estimated $1.2 billion worth of new construction went up in Lake County, according to county figures, significantly adding to most local coffers without increasing tax rates.
The building boom is the primary reason the total property tax revenue projected for the county has increased 6.0 percent, from $864 million last year to $916 million this year.
“There’s still a lot of new construction in Lake County, which allows the (revenues) to grow beyond 2.5 percent,” Wasylko said.
Some Lake County communities, however, continually struggle with the tax question, especially in areas with relatively low property values.
“Making ends meet in a tax-capped district, especially one that has a low assessed valuation, is very difficult,” said Kurt Valentin, director of business affairs in Round Lake Unit School District 116.
It took two attempts to get Round Lake voters to pass an education fund tax hike to maintain programs that would have been canceled last year.