Crook County corruption. Our property taxes are too damn high.
Downtown clients of Eddie Burke and Michael Madigan still getting the tax breaks.
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You know how when at Thanksgiving dinner you go over to the desserts for some pumpkin pie and most of it is gone? As usual, Uncle Bill got their first and cut a huge piece for himself and left hardly any for everyone else.
That’s how property taxes - the most regressive of taxation - works in Crook County.
It’s as if Uncle Bill is in charge of Crook County tax appeals.
When the billionaire downtown property owners get a break on their tax bill, our tax bill goes up.
Four years ago Fritz Kaegi ran for County Tax Assessor as a reformer. He promised to divide the pie differently. He beat the long-time Assessor Joe Berrios. Berrios was Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, the post now held by County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
Berrios’ standard operating procedure was to give the downtown corporations a tax break.
Berrios’ corruption was exposed in a series published by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois. The series showed how large commercial properties were underassessed, resulting in an unfair shift of the tax burden to smaller business and residential property owners.
As Kaegi attempted to reverse the practice he faced powerful opposition from lawyers, downtown real estate interests and their political tools.
Tax reform is not so easy in Crook County.
The downtown corporate interests hired influential lawyers to appeal their assessments. Lawyers like currently indicted Alder Eddie Burke and currently indicted former Speaker of the House Michael Madigan.
For two years, Ald. Edward M. Burke kept pushing to “land the tuna.”
According to a secretly made recording, that’s how the since-indicted Chicago City Council member referred to his long quest to get 601W Companies to hire his law firm.
The New York City company redeveloped Chicago’s long-abandoned main post office downtown, turning it into office space.
And Burke wanted desperately to be hired to handle property tax appeals on the development that 601W calls the Old Post Office, court records show.
601W already had another law firm for that, though, and wouldn’t budge.
But Burke kept pushing, according to the records.
Finally, his law firm, Klafter & Burke, got hired to handle the property tax appeals for a skyscraper 601W was buying — not for the Old Post Office, according to the federal racketeering indictment later filed against Burke.
He’s fighting those charges, which accuse him of trying to keep businesses he was soliciting for tax work from getting the approvals they needed from City Hall for their projects unless they hired his law firm.
The appeals were heard by the three member Crook County Board of Review. (Sun-Times)
When Fritz Kaegi instituted his reforms and taxed the downtown properties fairly, the owners of those properties got their lawyers to go to the Crook County Board of Review to overrule Kaegi.
For the Old Post Office Building at 433 W. Van Buren St., for example, the assessor calculated the market value at $871,031,166. According to the assessor, the Board of Review lowered it to $619,375,280, a reduction of 29%.
The assessor calculated the market value of the 1K Fulton building, 1000 W. Fulton St., at $197,271,980. The Board of Review reduced it to $161,794,884, or by 18%. For the hotel part of the Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago, the Board of Review cut the assessment by 31%.
Which is why those of us in the neighborhoods are getting hit hard with a tax bill right now.
In spite of the reform efforts of Fritz Kaegi, in Crook County it’s the same old same old.