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Chicago Homeowners Face Additional $250 Million Property Tax Increase

Chicago Homeowners Face Additional $250 Million Property Tax IncreaseBesides Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s $588 million property tax increase, approved by the Chicago City Council last fall for police and fire department pensions and school construction, Chicago homeowners will face an additional $250 million tax levy to pay for teacher pensions. This amount is $80 million more than Emanuel originally proposed for teacher pensions over a year ago.

Why Is This Happening?

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported, the hike is the result of a compromise deal between the Illinois Legislature and the City of Chicago, which didn’t receive as much money as it had hoped for from the State. A top mayoral aide quoted anonymously in the article said, “We didn’t get quite as much as we wanted from Springfield. The State is stepping up. They wanted to see the city step up.” As a result, Chicago homeowners will be paying up.
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Cook County Assessor’s Office Opens Northfield Township for 2016 Property Tax Appeals

The Cook County Assessor’s Office has announced that assessment notices were mailed on July 28, 2016, for Northfield Township.Cook County Property Tax Appeal

The deadline to file a 2016 property tax appeal at the Cook County Assessor’s Office is August 29, 2016.

Northfield Township valuation statistics can be found here.

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Illinois Pays the Nation’s Highest Property Tax Rates

Illinois Pays Highest Property TaxesIf you suspect that you’re paying too much in property taxes, consider this: Illinois has the highest median property tax rate in the United States, with various taxing agencies levying a combined rate of 2.67%, according to a nationwide analysis by CoreLogic, an Irvine-based research firm serving the global real estate and financial services industries.

The average median property tax rate across the country is 1.31%, which means that the owner of a home valued at $200,000 would pay annual property taxes totaling $2,620. In Illinois, however, a homeowner would pay $5,340 a year on a property of the same value. In Hawaii, which has the lowest median property tax rate at 0.31%, homeowners pay only $620 per year.

Only six other US states, all but one in the Northeast, have median property tax rates of more than 2%. As the Chicago Tribune points out, the states that border Illinois in the Midwest all have considerably lower property tax burdens: Indiana (0.88%), Missouri (1.26%), Iowa (1.69%) and Wisconsin (1.95%).
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Illinois Legislature Paves Way for More Chicago Property Tax Hikes

Illinois Legislature paves way for more Chicago property tax hikesRight before the start of the long 4th of July weekend, the Illinois Legislature passed and Governor Bruce Rauner signed into law a stopgap budget that provides a year of funding for the state’s public elementary and secondary schools and six months of financing for higher education, social service agencies, state operations and capital projects.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the clear winner in the deal, will receive $100 million of a $250 million statewide poverty grant targeted to low-income school districts. Who will pay for this? If you own a home in Cook County, it’s you and the only relief you have is to appeal your property taxes.
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Cook County Tax Officials Make Multimillion Dollar Error

Cook County Property Tax Multimillion Dollar MistakeRepublican presidential hopeful Donald Trump has garnered much negative press coverage over his alleged avoidance of paying his fair share of Cook County property taxes. The Chicago Sun-Times has reported that Trump hired a Chicago firm to represent him in his successful efforts to slash the property taxes on Trump International Hotel & Tower by $11.7 million (or 39%) over seven years.

Oops!

Although he openly admits that he tries to minimize his tax burden, it turns out that Trump has been a victim of ineptitude on the county’s part. As the Chicago Sun-Times reports, “Cook County tax officials mistakenly believed billionaire Donald Trump didn’t pay all the property taxes owed on his namesake Chicago skyscraper, shorting schools and other government agencies. They were wrong.”
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Why the Cook County Assessor Wants You to Appeal

Cook County Assessor's OfficeThe National Taxpayers Union has estimated that as many as 60% of taxable properties in the United States are over-assessed, but fewer than 5% of property owners nationwide challenge their assessments.

The reasons for this include being too busy, lacking awareness and knowledge of the process, assuming that an appeal would be a waste of time because it likely would be unsuccessful, and not paying attention to deadlines. In actuality, appealing your property tax assessment might save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year – and the Cook County Assessor’s office wants you to appeal, even though they’re the ones assessing your property…
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As Cook County’s Big Property Tax Hike Is Felt, Kensington May Be Able To Help

Cook County Property Tax ReliefOn June 13, the Cook County Clerk’s office released 2015 property tax rate figures for the whole county.

On average, Chicago homeowners will have to pay 12.8% more in property taxes than they did at this time last year based on the new tax rates, which includes both the value of your home and the land it’s on.
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