As election season kicks off in earnest and the Springfield veto session hurtles to its conclusion, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Assessor Fritz Kaegi are both pressing state legislators to expand property tax break eligibility for lower-income seniors.
But they have faced pushback from a group representing south suburban municipal leaders who fear those breaks would hike bills for everyone else, pushing up already-high tax rates and making collections even harder.
Success would give both leaders a chance to point to tangible property tax relief efforts by the time bills land and before voters consider their candidacies in the March Democratic primary election.
Both are backing legislation that would raise the income level for eligibility. The most straightforward bill gradually raises the rate from $75,000 for the 2026 tax year to $79,000 for 2028.
“We think there would be on the order of tens of thousands that could come back on” under increased thresholds, Kaegi said at a press conference last week.
That bill would also increase the income eligibility by the same amount for the senior deferral program, which essentially offers a state loan of up to $7,500 per tax year to help low-income seniors pay their bills. The loan is paid back when the property is sold or the participant dies. Preckwinkle’s office said the program is underutilized and recommended expanding eligibility for that program, too.
Property tax bills are now months late thanks to prolonged tech problems, but Preckwinkle said last week she is hopeful they will be ready in early November.
County officials are trying again in Springfield after coming up largely empty in the spring legislative session. They’re hopeful the General Assembly will pass their proposals before veto session ends this week, though much depends on whether lawmakers have the time to take up the issue while also dealing with the many other pressing problems on their plates.
Pending legislation in Springfield would tweak the current Low-Income Senior Freeze Homestead Exemption, which is only available for homeowners older than 65 with an annual household income of $65,000 or lower. Designed to blunt the impact of rising valuations that help fuel higher bills, the exemption “freezes” the taxable value of a senior’s property.
An estimated 295,613 households were eligible in 2023, about 56% of seniors in the county, according to estimates from Preckwinkle’s office. That’s down from two thirds in 2018.
While their neighbors’ valuations might climb year after year, a senior’s “frozen” value stays in place as long as their household income is below the threshold and they re-apply to receive it each year.
Preckwinkle and Kaegi argue thousands have lost the exemption because of rising incomes out of homeowners’ control. That $65,000 exemption limit hasn’t changed since 2018, but social security benefits, which are annually adjusted for inflation, have risen year after year. Mandated minimum withdrawals from retirement accounts or “true up” pension payments can also boost senior income unwittingly.
Kaegi is also pressing a separate bill allowing the freeze exemption to be automatically renewed. By tapping state income tax data directly, Kaegi said it would save seniors from having to prove their eligibility each year and spare many from the chore of making a trip downtown.
Standard tax breaks for homeowners, seniors, people with disabilities and World War II veterans are already auto-renewed.
In all, more than 10,000 seniors lose their freeze each year, either because they made too much or forgot to reapply, Kaegi said.
“Anything that we can do, we want to help ease those burdens, especially for people that are living on a fixed income,” Gregary Brown, the advocacy and outreach director at AARP Northern Illinois, said at the press conference with Kaegi last week. “These tax bills have real life implications. They put seniors in just about an impossible situation. In many instances, we see people that are forced to sell their homes, forced to downsize, and also, even worse, force them into foreclosure because they can’t pay their property taxes.”
But county leaders have received pushback from the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association, which expressed concerns that something akin to the “perfect storm” from 2018 tax breaks might repeat itself.
Heading into that year, Springfield leadership passed three tax break changes aimed at blunting the impact of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s record property tax hikes in the city. But they had another unintended consequence: thousands of south suburban homes were knocked off the tax rolls entirely.
Expanded eligibility brought thousands of homes’ bills down to $0 and reduced many others. That meant all other home and business owners had to pay more to make up the difference. The burden shift was especially stark in towns and villages with already high property tax rates where it’s hard to attract retailers and other businesses to move in or to collect tax bills at all.
Helping seniors is a “worthy endeavor,” SSMMA Executive Director Kristi DeLaurentiis told the Tribune last week, but there’s a large share of single family households in south suburban communities that would qualify under the increased income limits.
She worries about how many bills would fall dramatically, pushing a heavier burden on other residents still reeling from their most recent bills..
“We saw huge spikes in our bills in 2023, we haven’t recovered from those,” DeLaurentiis said. That was the tax year the south suburbs saw both the full impact of the post-pandemic residential real estate boom and the end of Kaegi’s “COVID adjustment,” which temporarily cut down on assessments.
DeLaurentiis has suggested the county make the income increase more modest and in the long term, consider creating a floor so that all homeowners pay at least some property taxes.
Preckwinkle’s director of property tax policy, Jim Thompson, said the office asked researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago to estimate how much tax rates would go up for each suburban municipality if the freeze limit went up to $85,000. That analysis, which combined 2023 property tax figures with census data, did conclude the biggest hikes were in the south suburbs, but that those increases were minimal and would only happen over time.
The largest shift was in Calumet City, where the overall tax rate increased by .16 percentage points. The biggest impact from the “perfect storm” in 2018 — increases to other larger exemptions for seniors and homeowners — isn’t on the table this time.
Elsewhere in the rush to the end of veto session, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas is again asking legislators to punt the date of the county’s tax sale.
She’d hoped to pass several reforms last spring to ensure the state didn’t violate the law under a recent U.S. Supreme Court Case, Tyler v. Hennepin County. She’s hoping now to take those reforms up in the next spring session, and potentially make more tweaks pending another Supreme Court case, Pung v. Isabella County. At stake is whether tax sales like Cook County has been conducting for years violate constitutional protections against excessive fines.
And now that this year’s property tax bills are likely due in December — months later than usual — Pappas is also asking legislatures to delay the due date for the next round of bills early next year. Moving that date from March 1 to April 1, 2026 means taxpayers will have another month of breathing room between bills.