More Top Picks Google Pixel Watch Review
player ready...A Cook County program to help homeowners walloped by property tax hikes between 2021 and 2023 is now taking applications.
The Cook County Homeowner Relief Fund will pay $1,000 to eligible homeowners who saw a property tax increase of 50% or more in 2021, 2022 or 2023. That includes those whose bills went up from $0 in those years.
The $15 million program will take just a small bite out of the estimated 95,000 homeowners who saw a spike that big, according to the Cook County assessor’s office. A large concentration is in the south suburbs.
Only homeowners at or below the 100% of the county’s median income will qualify — that’s about $120,000 for a family of four and $96,000 for a family of two. Property owners must have an active homeowner exemption — which proves the home is the applicant’s primary address — and have lived there both the year of the tax increase and the year before.
Applications are open until Oct. 10 at hrf.cookcountyil.gov.
After a screening round to check basic criteria, applicants will have to submit documents to verify their eligibility. If they make it past both those rounds, they will be entered in a lottery to determine whether they will be awarded a payout.
Commissioners set aside funding for the program late last year during the budget debate and settled on eligibility terms last spring, acknowledging it was a “short-term solution” on the way to tackling broader property tax reforms. The County Board itself has not raised its property tax levy — except to capture new properties — since the 1990s.
At a news conference announcing the open application window, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said property tax reform is “one of the most important issues facing the county” that the president, assessor, clerk, treasurer and board of review are working together to tackle.
Commissioner Bridget Gainer, who first floated the relief program, said at the same news conference she hopes the program helps prevent people from being taxed out of their homes and that data from applicants will be used to develop further reform legislation.
Bills that are typically due by August are still not ready to be mailed, thanks to ongoing technological snags in a countywide upgrade to property tax office software. That decade-long upgrade helmed by contractor Tyler Technologies still has dozens of checklist items before bills can be generated and mailed. “Cashiering” operations — or how the treasurer takes in payments and turns them back over to various taxing bodies — are also part of that upgrade and are not yet complete.
As of Friday, two dozen of Tyler’s responsibilities were overdue, according to the county’s property tax tracker.
On Monday morning, Preckwinkle penned a letter to Tyler’s chief administrative officer, describing an “incomplete” filing Tyler had given to the treasurer. It was “missing thousands of data points necessary for the Treasurer to perform their job,” she wrote. “This sloppy transfer of data is the primary reason tax bills have been delayed. At this stage of work, problems like these are embarrassing.”
Errors in various data fields can lead to tax bills being miscalculated and lead to over- or undercharging on final bills. In previous correspondence, Tyler has blamed the treasurer’s office for a lack of preparation or full understanding of how its old legacy system worked, a charge the treasurer has denied.
In a separate letter in response, Tyler’s Abby Diaz defended the company’s performance, but said it was focused on immediate next steps and said it resolved the problem that cropped up over the weekend. She agreed to daily calls with Preckwinkle’s office. “I recognize this may sound hollow given the frustrations,” she said, but the company is “sincerely committed to this project.”
To help taxing bodies bridge the gap between the time property tax revenue typically comes in and the delayed payback date, the county reopened a loan fund
More Top Picks Best Grill Insulation Blankets For Winter
earlier this month, pledging a total of $300 million to help smaller and needier cities, villages, park, school and library districts with their cash flow. Those taxing bodies have until Oct. 3 to apply. The county will get paid back automatically when tax payments do come in.