Cook County’s property tax system is a Rubik’s Cube for even those relatively steeped in assessments and equalization factors value to decipher. So pity the ordinary property owners who have to pay the taxman two times every year.
All they know is that the tax cost of owning a home — you know, that thing we call the American Dream — keeps growing at rates that seem unsustainable. And, naturally, they want to know who to blame.
One Cook County officeholder, Assessor Fritz Kaegi, already has felt the public’s anger, losing his Democratic primary reelection race to challenger Patrick Hynes. Kaegi in many respects simply was the messenger who got removed for being in a post directly related to property taxes when many Chicago homeowners got the bad news late last year that their taxes had soared due to the pandemic’s deflating effect on commercial property values.
So leave it to the always-canny Cook County treasurer, Maria Pappas, to issue a comprehensive report less than two weeks after voters made their displeasure known at the polls — saying to 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 that bad property-tax news straight to people’s mailboxes and thus could be vulnerable to suffering Kaegi’s fate come November when she’s up for reelection, was able both to confirm what angry residents suspected while also tacitly saying: I’m on your side.
Additionally, Pappas has a seasoned, competent staff, and they were able to frame the property-tax awfulness in ways the average Joe and Jane can understand. Over the past three decades, went their analysis, total property tax levies in Cook County rose at roughly twice the pace of inflation and considerably more than than average wages. From 1995 until 2024, Cook County tax levies rose nearly 182% to $19.2 billion from $6.8 billion, according to the study. Inflation over that period was 91%.
Those simple findings, in and of themselves, are as damning of our state and local governments as anything we can think of. They represent nothing less than abject failure of governance.
Consider: In Chicago, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot just a few years ago proposed to put the city’s property tax haul on automatic, with the levy rising each year at 5% or the rate of inflation, whichever was lower. That would have been far less than what county residents — or, indeed, city homeowners — have experienced over the past 30 years. For city residents, the increase over that period has been 177%, to $1.8 billion in 2024 from $647 million in 1995.
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Lightfoot’s policy was ended by Mayor Brandon Johnson, who had promised during his campaign not to raise property taxes and then went on to propose a $300 million hike, a 17% increase, for 2025. The City Council rejected that, and closed the door on any property tax rise.
In her report, Pappas lays the blame on virtually every nook and cranny of government in the state of Illinois. Her targets include some familiar ones, such as the state’s overabundance of taxing bodies like townships and various obscure districts. In many parts of Cook County, there are so many governmental entities grabbing a piece of the action that property tax bills look like grocery-store receipts.
School districts are a primary source of nosebleed property tax bills; for example, relentless maximum property tax hikes by the bloated Chicago Public Schools account for well over half of what Chicago property owners pay.
But, elsewhere in Cook County, property taxes are what school districts must turn to when the state fails to support public education at the level most other states do.
The state is a culprit in other respects as well, as it regularly imposes unfunded mandates on local governments, which legally don’t have the same array of revenue-raising options that the state does. The most inexcusable of these mandates in recent times was Springfield’s sweetening of pension benefits for certain police and firefighters in Chicago in 2025.
As he made his decision to sign that bill into law, adding $11 billion to the city of Chicago’s preexisting mountain of pension liabilities, a spokesperson for JB Pritzker said at the time that the governor “remains committed to maintaining fiscal discipline at all levels of government and expects the city of Chicago to implement these changes with careful planning and fiscal discipline.”
Just how does a locality go about “implementing” $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 the state lawmakers from Chicago, who voted unanimously for the bill, when their property taxes inevitably rise to cover this massive debt.
Speaking of which, the vast bulk of the city of Chicago’s portion of those property tax bills that had Chicagoans gnashing their teeth late last year isn’t paying for city services. It’s covering the pensions of city workers, both retired and current. And there’s no relief in sight on that front, as the city’s four public pension funds remain abysmally underfunded, even after years of property tax hikes to redress that financial millstone.
Pappas’ 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 feels very close indeed.
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