The due date for property tax bills has come and gone, but Cook County officials remain under siege.
On one side, a group of pastors are pressing the assessor, members of the Board of Review and the treasurer to unwind this year’s bills for South and West siders and cap future bill increases. On the other side, suburban school districts are begging to receive their share of property tax revenues to make payroll.
Caught in the middle are leaders — most of whom face reelection in less than 90 days — with only limited capacity to address their claims.
Property owners have been paying their tax bills since mid-November, but none of those dollars have yet made their way to taxing bodies such as schools, libraries and park districts.
County commissioners have been inundated with messages from suburban school district leaders whose budgets often rely heavily on property tax revenue asking when they can expect to receive their cut.
Meanwhile, costs are racking up for the public agencies that count on the money.
As the waiting game plays out, school districts have “thrown away and wasted” millions of dollars to make do, Ben Collins, superintendent of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64, testified at the County Board on Wednesday. Several have borrowed money through tax anticipation notes or warrants, tapped reserves or investment accounts, or moved cash around to cover operating costs.
On Thursday, Diana McCluskey, the chief school business official at Palatine School District 15, testified that her district borrowed $25 million. Interest, attorney and banking fees will cost them about $450,000, and lost interest from cashing out investments will cost another $700,000, she estimated.
Commissioners haven’t been able to answer when the dollars will start flowing. Those tax distributions have been stalled because of the ongoing county upgrade of property tax systems managed by Texas-based Tyler Technologies and overseen by Cook County Board Toni Preckwinkle’s Bureau of Technology. Distributions come from Treasurer Maria Pappas.
“I’m embarrassed and appalled that we’re not done yet, I take accountability for that, as I hope my counterparts do in the property offices. We all have to do this together,” Chief Technology Officer Tom Lynch told commissioners Wednesday.
The decade-long effort has led to cross-office clashes and open criticism of Tyler, one of the largest government tech contractors in the country. “Tyler, as I think we’ve talked about extensively, has not been a good, reliable partner,” Lynch said. “They have missed a lot of deadlines. They’ve had an awful lot of rework.”
The property tax upgrade has cost tens of millions of dollars, including ongoing payments to keep the county’s old computer system running and outside consulting expenses. The County Board this week approved an additional $1.5 million contract extension to Guidehouse, which is helping manage the project. Problems plaguing implementation of Tyler’s system across property tax offices led to this year’s late bills.
The biggest distributions to local schools, parks, libraries and villages typically start a couple weeks after the first property tax money from escrow accounts hit the county’s coffers, school superintendents say. In a normal year, that would be in early spring, then again in late summer. That late summer distribution is now months late.
High hopes that distributions could have kicked off last week were dashed after the property tax offices realized they were working with an outdated file for testing. The error wasn’t discovered until Thursday morning and set the effort back by a few days. Pappas’ office blamed Preckwinkle technology officials for providing the wrong file months ago. Preckwinkle’s office said distributions are ultimately Pappas’ responsibility.
Tyler’s media team, meanwhile, said it has been working “around the clock” for weeks to finish its piece and expected to hand off its work Thursday morning, until it learned “that county data critical to a correct distribution process had not been provided to us… our team is yet again working tirelessly to finish this work.”
Superintendents said the strain has damaged school leaders’ reputations for financial stewardship with their boards, teachers and families. The interest costs or funding lost from investments are gone, regardless of when distributions do start.
Erin Murphy, superintendent of West Northfield School District 31, told the Tribune 94% of her revenue comes from property taxes. To help maintain operations, the district issued $4.3 million in tax anticipation warrants, or TAWs. If they pay it back by the end of February, it will cost $44,238 in interest, and potentially hundreds of thousands more in lost investment income. It’s money that could have gone toward extra staffing, supplies or building up reserves, she said.
“We’ve already moved all of our funds into working cash. If we don’t start seeing money, we are also looking at a second round of TAWs,” Murphy said. “So not only have we lost the interest and investment revenue that is part of our budget, but we are also hit with additional interest and expenses to issue Tax Anticipation Warrants. I’m not even sure how much interest yet because I don’t know when we are paying it back.”
Her school district and others’ credit ratings were too high to qualify for Cook County’s Bridge Loan Fund.
Though they come from suburban elementary districts not typically considered financially strapped, Mary Gorr, superintendent for Mount Prospect School District 57 said community members have questioned “every penny we spend — and that’s their right. So being forced to waste this significant amount of money on interest and emergency borrowing, when we’ve done everything by the book, feels deeply unfair to our taxpayers and incredibly irresponsible of the county.”
Rob Grossi, an education finance consultant who has worked with districts across the county, said less affluent districts that receive evidence-based funding from the state haven’t suffered the acute cash flow issue that northern districts have. But if a cash flow problem does pop up, many south suburban schools “do not have the same credit quality as the northern Cook County school districts, so when those districts hit their tipping point and need to borrow funds it might be more challenging.”
His worst fear is that funds don’t land until mid-January, triggering borrowing demand that might overwhelm local lenders, leaving schools with lower credit with limited options.
Grossi said he was not aware of any school district in the county with low enough credit to qualify for the bridge loan. Some, such as Dolton School District 148, have been able to borrow from their school township treasurer.
School districts have had to move money around before when bills were late before. But this year has been worse, superintendents said, because of a lack of communication from county officials.
Asked about those complaints, Preckwinkle said, “part of the reason that we have been circumspect in our comments is that we face a series of challenges in terms of getting the production moving.”
Earlier in the week, a group of pastors marched between property tax offices and asked for the opposite of what school districts were clamoring for: a series of freezes or rollbacks to ease the burden of property tax hikes in their neighborhoods.
“South Side residents are being crushed by astronomical property tax increases,” the Rev. Ira Acree said, pointing to 6% property increases in communities like Lincoln Park while Englewood climbed by 82%. “This is not a shared sacrifice, this is selective punishment.”
They demanded the treasurer charge no interest for late payments, the Board of Review reverse its granted appeals for downtown properties, and the assessor roll back and freeze the increased assessments that hit the south and west sides.
The horse was already out of the barn, however.
Their news conference was held on the last day homeowners could pay their bills for properties assessed in 2024. The state, not the treasurer, controls interest costs on late payments. Any appeals granted by the Board of Review now would only apply on 2026 property tax bills. They called for the state, too, to implement caps on property tax increases — which would also likely limit how much money local governments could raise.
Even so, the offices have been working to grant what relief they can. The board reopened its appeals window — receiving 14,864 complaints in all, the vast majority from homeowners — and hosted several outreach events in the last month. The assessor processed 11,700 missing exemptions for homeowners between Nov. 14 and Dec. 15.
“The whole property tax system is a racket and it needs to be shaken up from top to bottom,” the Rev. Marshall Hatch said.
“Everyone is saying they’re not the one to blame,” Hatch added. “And so we’re gonna blame everybody with this.”
