Cook County is making tens of millions in no-cost loans available to local governments just to help them keep the lights on while the distribution of property tax receipts is delayed for months.
(Again.)
Talk about an ongoing indictment of basic governance around these parts.
Some 32 villages, school districts and library districts borrowed a collective $191 million from the county in recent months as they and other taxing bodies await property tax payouts, which Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas’ office says are coming next month, according to reporting by the Tribune and the Tribune-owned Pioneer Press and Daily Herald. Those payouts will be two months late.
Last year at this time, the situation was even worse. Property tax bills weren’t mailed until mid-November, and some school districts didn’t receive their full distributions until February of this year.
The primary culprit identified then by county officials was Texas-based Tyler Technologies, the vendor the county chose over a decade ago to modernize its ancient computer systems. The process of transitioning the county to the new system proved far more balky than anticipated and ended up costing taxpayers much more than advertised.
This year? Tyler doesn’t appear to be the problem. Or at least we haven’t heard county officials make that case. So who then is accountable?
Unsurprisingly, no elected official at the county level is raising their hand to take responsibility. You know how it is. This kind of thing just … happens.
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The buck obviously stops with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, now seeking to be reelected to a fifth term. And, frankly, we’d note that even though Maria Pappas consistently has said she is downstream of all these problems, which may well be the case, it still says treasurer on her door. She is seeking her eighth term as treasurer in November and also has said she is considering a run for mayor of Chicago.
Among the hardest hit by these delays is perennial fiscal basket case Chicago Public Schools.
In the past, Preckwinkle hasn’t made Cook County’s bridge loans available to the nation’s fourth-largest school system, but this year she said CPS potentially could get help from the residual balance after smaller entities had received their loans. CPS ended up not applying, saying that the entirety of the $300 million available was barely sufficient to cover a month of payroll.
The unused funding ended up being $109 million. That surely could have helped CPS get through the delay.
It’s too late, now. The county told reporters the window for CPS to seek assistance closed on Sept. 1.
That also seems to us a further governance failure. As it stands, CPS says the interest cost of property tax delays throughout 2026 has topped $10 million and the tab continues to grow. Any little bit would have helped. CPS, which just saw its junk-rated credit put on negative watch by S&P Global Ratings, ought to have sought assistance, and the county ought to have bent over backward to provide it.
One might think that, of all the county’s duties, collecting and distributing taxes would be one at which our tax-burdened region would be adept by now. The irony of this continuing failure is thick.
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