In an often-heated session with the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, the Democratic candidates for Cook County Assessor this week hurled accusations about their each others’ character, competence, and plans for the office.
Incumbent two-term Assessor Fritz Kaegi and challenger Pat Hynes met for an endorsement session Monday afternoon, hours after Kaegi highlighted donations Hynes accepted from property tax attorneys Hynes responded that Kaegi had also taken thousands from real estate investors and developers.
The office assigns property values to 1.8 million parcels across Cook County. In recent years, Kaegi has pledged to level the playing field by raising assessments on commercial properties that were too low, or as a prior Tribune investigation found, were unchanged for several years. Over his last two terms, he’s earned the ire of some large developers and members of the county’s Board of Review, who say he has overshot his estimates and sowed instability.
Kaegi, a former investment portfolio manager, has largely been able to self-fund his campaigns. Recent tax returns show he has at times netted six-figure gains from personal investments. That personal wealth has allowed him to do without contributions from attorneys specializing in property tax appeals seeking assessment reductions from his office or at the Board of Review.
“They want to bring back pay-to-play in this office,” Kaegi said, noting he’d sworn off such donations since 2018, and that the county’s inspector general had flagged the contributions as ethically problematic years ago. “It did so much damage to our system. It did so much damage to the perceptions of taxpayers.”
Since June, Hynes has accepted nearly $90,000 from property tax firms and attorneys and nearly $13,000 from property tax appraisers, who offer property valuation reports for attorneys filing appeals.
Hynes, the current Lyons Township Assessor who previously worked in the Cook County Assessor’s Office under Kaegi, called the “pay-to-play” accusations “ridiculous.”
“Property tax appeal attorneys have had more to lose by supporting a challenger to an incumbent assessor than anyone,” Hynes said.
He said they are supporting him because the unpredictability of Kaegi’s assessments is hurting new development. Kaegi’s failure to account for new construction and update the tax rolls was also shifting the tax burden to other property owners, Hynes said. Even the property characteristics for the Pope’s suburban home were incorrect, he noted.
The Tribune and Illinois Answers Project tallied $444 million in property value that Kaegi had not added to the rolls in August of 2024, including new construction and renovations.
The office has since added most of those properties back and pledged reforms to better capture permits that should trigger fresh inspections. Kaegi argued missing those properties had a negligible impact on other residents’ bills — “about two bucks,” he estimated — and that under-assessments of big commercial buildings “is a far larger problem.”
Kaegi highlighted his work improving fairness in residential assessments and improving the accuracy of assessments for businesses, apartment buildings, and offices.
A study comparing sales prices to assessments found Kaegi had initially overshot commercial assessments in the south suburbs in 2020 and the city in 2021, but that appeals to his office or the Board of Review had brought them closer to the mark. North suburban assessments were lower than their sales prices across the board in 2022.
Hynes countered that Kaegi’s criticism was hypocritical because he accepted donations from other real estate interests, including development firms and real estate investors like Jerry Reinsdorf and Joe Mansueto.
“My record is very clear. I have a 30-year record of tenacious taxpayer advocacy. I’m doing this to keep the taxpayers front and center in the work that I do,” Hynes said, “and I will not involve any pay-to-play or any of that other nonsense. It’s insulting.”
Kaegi shot back that the unit Hynes worked in — field inspections — “was one of the least accountable patronage havens in our office. And I think it’s very telling that he doesn’t even admit that it’s wrong” to take donations from property tax attorneys.
Hynes said he made numerous objections to Kaegi’s work while still at the office and after leaving, worked to compile missed properties and add ones from Lyons township back on the county’s rolls. Hynes conceded Joe Berrios, Kaegi’s predecessor, “had no earthly idea what he was doing,” but said Kaegi dismantled systems in the office that had worked well decades before.
The COVID adjustment Kaegi instituted to reduce residential assessments both went against best practices and caused huge spikes in assessments in later years, Hynes said. He argued that assessments of South and West Side communities like North Lawndale and West Englewood, later leading to massive bill spikes, were evidence of Kaegi’s problematic practices.
Kaegi said those assessments were accurate and reflective of sales activity there. A Tribune and Illinois Answers Project analysis did show rising sales prices and evidence of some speculative investment in neighborhoods like West Englewood and North Lawndale, where housing costs are among the lowest in the city.
Hynes echoed skepticism among residents about their property values. In discussions with taxpayers in North Lawndale, Hynes said “I asked them, ‘Can you sell your house for three times as much as you could have three years ago? Can you sell your house for twice as much as you could have three years ago?’ And if the answer is no, you need a new Cook County assessor.”
Kaegi said bills only hit those neighborhoods as hard as they did because of massive drops in commercial assessments downtown granted by the county’s Board of Review. “It is a fact that cuts to commercial assessments shifted half a billion dollars of levies onto homeowners, which translates to about $700 per Chicago homeowner, which constitutes almost the entire increase that was felt in neighborhoods like Englewood, Austin and South Shore.”