To hear the bluster, you’d think the campaign for Cook County assessor was the ultimate showdown in the fight for right against wrong.
For one thing, the assessor plays a major role in determining how much you pay in property taxes. And by you I mean everyone who pays for a place to live—including renters, most of whom have never even seen a property tax bill but pay property tax hikes for their landlords in the form of higher rents.
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The assessor determines property values in part by tracking property sales. It’s a monumental task, prone to error, since there are more than 1.3 million residential parcels in the county. If your property is assessed higher than it should be, you pay more than you should in property taxes. If your property is assessed too low, you get a break. But it’s not just computers blindly crunching numbers that determine a property’s value. Human beings have their fingers on the scale.
There’s a cottage industry of property tax lawyers—if you own property, you’ve probably received solicitation letters from some of them—who appeal cases before the assessor and the board. If you don’t want to bother filling out appeal forms or searching the assessor’s website to see how comparable homes in your neighborhood are assessed, you hire one of these lawyers to do the legwork and let him keep a portion of what you save in taxes.
Berrios says Claypool’s a hypocrite who takes money from the very wealthy, plenty of whom petition the assessor or review board for reductions. In fact, there’s a whole website dedicated to the subject, victimsofjoeberrios.com. Though Berrios claims he doesn’t know who operates the site (it’s registered to Domains by Proxy Inc.), he managed to refer me to it three times in the course of a recent phone interview.
There’s another thing to keep in mind as you prepare to cast your vote. The larger problem—which eclipses the assessor’s race—has to do with Illinois’s overdependence on property taxes, particularly for funding education. In Chicago roughly half of property taxes go to the public schools. It’s well over 60 percent in many of the suburbs, like Evanston and Wilmette.
