It’s still unclear when Cook County homeowners and other property owners will receive their property tax bills, top officials told commissioners this week, thanks to lingering defects in a tech upgrade already delayed by several years.
Now the county has launched a $300 million loan fund to help cities, towns and other taxing bodies that will struggle to make ends meet without those property tax revenues in hand.
The new system was supposed to be ready in April. County leaders committed to officially make the switch off their legacy system — housed on decades-old mainframe computers — to fully adopt Tyler Technology’s system in May in time for the normal bill schedule, with bills due by August 1.
“I want to be transparent with this board,” Chief Technology Officer Tom Lynch told commissioners on the county board’s Technology Committee Wednesday. “We have made a lot of progress, but we’re not done either.”
Property tax offices cannot generate accurate bills yet, nor could they distribute the money back to taxing bodies after bills are paid, Lynch told commissioners.
In response, the county board on Thursday directly authorized borrowing $300 million to fund a Local Taxing District Loan Program. The county created a similar fund in 2022 — the last time bills were late — to aid suburban taxing jurisdictions that had a cash crunch and high borrowing costs. The county will be automatically paid back when those property tax revenues do come in.
The need might be higher this time, county Chief Financial Officer Tanya Anthony said, because local jurisdictions have fewer federal pandemic dollars propping up their budgets. Taxing bodies with less than 120 days cash on hand and a bond rating lower than the county’s can apply now through October 3. The city of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools are ineligible.
Under the most optimistic timeline, it would take a little less than one month for bills to land in mailboxes, officials estimated Wednesday.
“The vast majority of those outstanding items” to get bills out the door are Tyler’s responsibility, Lynch said. Once Tyler makes fixes, they must be tested by the county clerk or Treasurer’s Office for accuracy, making the ultimate timeline foggy. Lynch said Friday he expects bills to go out before the end of the calendar year.
Calculating and mailing property tax bills is a complex task involving data for 1.7 million properties plus dozens of inputs for assessments, exemptions, tax breaks, location, ownership, and where to mail bills.
The main property tax offices — the assessor, clerk, and treasurer — are each responsible for different inputs. The Assessor’s Office shares final estimates of value for each property. The clerk calculates annual tax rates based on each local taxing body’s levy. Bills must also include exemptions and incentives before the treasurer posts and mails them.
County officials agreed to cancel the launch this spring after encountering a series of critical problems with those inputs. The problem list grew through June. Various fixes to one defect would cause new ones elsewhere in the system, officials said.
The critical list has dwindled from roughly 250 items to about 34, according to Lynch, who was described by one commissioner as the project’s “traffic cop.”
On Wednesday, Carolyn Eloby, the deputy clerk of real estate and tax services for Clerk Monica Gordon, told commissioners their office would not turn their data over to Treasurer Maria Pappas “until the math adds up, and right now it does not.”
Pressed by commissioners at the same hearing, Tyler Chief Administrative Officer Abby Diaz blamed this spring’s launch delay on new issues “surfaced for the very first time… not by Tyler, by the participating agencies that created brand new requirements and other issues for us to address,” heaping more on “this already huge mountain of work we had all completed together.”
Pappas’ Chief of Staff David Byrnes disputed that. Earlier, small-scale testing was successful, he said, but the system failed to work when the rubber hit the road in production.
The dispute was a small window into the behind-the-scenes tensions this summer.
In a late July budget hearing, Pappas — Tyler’s loudest and most public critic — said during a recent test, 1.1 million bills out of 1.7 million had the incorrect final charge, 1 million had an incorrect assessed value, and 375,000 exemption values were wrong.
She held up examples of bills with errors: one that showed the Cook County Forest Preserves’ share of the bill was $0, when it should have been $577. A bill for a commercial property in Melrose Park ended up $4,000 lower than it should have been.
“I anticipate a lot of litigation,” Pappas told the board then. “The enemy’s not in the room. You’ve gotta go after Tyler!”
In communications leading up to that hearing obtained via a Tribune records request, Tyler officials and board President Toni Preckwinkle criticized Pappas for obstructionism during the project’s final push.
In a July 2 email to Preckwinkle and her team, Tyler’s Diaz said the treasurer’s office was the source of the initial holdup in May, citing its lack of preparation, “misunderstanding of their functional requirements,” and a “lack of institutional knowledge” about how parts of their own legacy system worked.
Pappas subjected the Tyler team “to expletive-laden tirades,” Diaz said, adding, “The pot-stirring references to a potential termination or potential litigation are counter-productive.”
The company was unfairly scapegoated in private and in public, Diaz continued, citing “wildly inappropriate articles” by the Tribune and Injustice Watch. “Our expectations for this project and our project team remain steadfast, despite the challenges and the position we have been put in. We cannot, though, remain a silent punching bag.”
The same day, Preckwinkle’s office began releasing a daily status report on the dozens of to-do items stakeholders were responsible for.
Pappas penned a letter to Preckwinkle about mounting refunds for taxpayers and payouts to taxing bodies, blaming the president’s office for failing to manage the project, and misplacing “the blame for Tyler’s unconscionable delay on the property tax offices now toiling to clean up the mess.”
Preckwinkle responded that Pappas’ letters “misstate facts, assign blame and expect others to resolve issues your office is responsible for addressing. I urge you to direct your energy instead toward working constructively toward solutions in our working sessions.”
Tempers have since cooled, Preckwinkle’s staff acknowledged Thursday, a credit to leaders of those offices.
Even so, Lynch told commissioners to expect progress “in weeks, not months.”