Village library leaders have added their voices to the chorus of complaints about delayed and sporadic distributions of Cook County property tax revenues, saying the situation has drained their reserves, making it harder to hire or buy new books.
And in the latest complication in Cook County’s ongoing property tax woes, about $175 million in excess money was sent to taxing bodies that weren’t expecting it.
Echoing problems first publicly raised by suburban school district leaders, a subset of public library directors reported they have had to go into “ongoing financial triage” because property tax receipts that typically land in their bank accounts in the summer were months late.
Libraries received the bulk of their expected dollars last week and are expected to be made entirely whole this week. But in a memo shared with the Tribune, a group of library leaders said in recent months they’ve had to put off payments to vendors, paused new hires and canceled or scaled back public programs.
The impact on libraries is another wrinkle in the long-delayed upgrade of the county’s internal property tax systems with contractor Tyler Technologies. Though taxpayers settled their bills between mid-November and December, it has taken extra time to get those dollars into the bank accounts of cities, park districts, schools and libraries.
Village library districts have teamed up to note they’ve waited even longer for significant funds to flow compared with their city or school district counterparts. Because they are considered “sub-agencies” whose levies are approved by municipal boards, they didn’t receive stopgap emergency funding from Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas’ office back in December.
Under normal circumstances, all of the county’s 2,000 taxing bodies would have gotten their money through August and September, but bills were sent late thanks to a series of setbacks in the decadelong tech overhaul. Unlike other years when bills were delayed, taxing bodies complained they were often left in the dark about when it would be resolved.
Those timelines were often an open question to county officials that have been working overtime to finish the decadelong property tax upgrade. The county hired emerging government tech behemoth Tyler Technologies in 2015 to get the county off its rickety and outdated mainframe computer system and onto a unified platform for tax offices.
Completion has taken more than twice as long as initially anticipated as the project repeatedly missed deadlines, triggering rising costs, frustration and blame among elected officials and company leaders.
Two of the final few hurdles — calculating and mailing tax bills and distributing that revenue back to government agencies — have been politically thorny.
All along, library leaders said they relied on word of mouth or forwarded messages from other local officials to understand when and how much money might come through. Without a definite schedule and with emerging cash flow trouble, some libraries tapped rainy day-funds or cashed out investments earlier than they planned, explored short-term borrowing or considered contingency deals with their cities, towns or villages.
Many school districts previously told the Tribune they did the same, estimating the downstream cost of the delay totaled nearly $122 million.
The treasurer announced distribution dates in mass communications to taxing agencies twice last month, but noted they were not a guarantee.
In a typical cycle, money would start flowing to agencies a couple of weeks after bills were paid. For this year, that would have been around the start of December. But libraries reported money didn’t start flowing to them in earnest until mid-January.
Amy Franco, the executive director of Hillside Public Library, reached out to other directors to see if they were similarly in the dark. She heard back throughout January that others were weeks or even days away from running out of cash. While most other taxing districts had received about 87% of their due taxes near the end of last month, Hillside had gotten just 10%.
“Libraries are used to planning for delays, we’re resilient, we tell ourselves this all the time, but the resilience only goes so far without clear information,” Franco said. As of Friday, 97% of distributions were out the door, county officials said. “I’m really relieved some of this money has started to move, but I have pretty serious concerns about how close a lot of these libraries came to crisis and how easily it could happen again.”
In recent weeks, “we stopped ordering books and materials,” Jamie Paicely, the Flossmoor Public Library director, told the Tribune. “I don’t want to cut hours, I don’t want to cut services, I don’t want to cut staff, we’ll cut what we can to stop the outflow until we get something coming in. It was very hard to kind of operate, because deep down you know the money is going to come in. The county has the money, it’s going to come to us, but it was that lack of communication that made it hard to do my job.”
Forest Park Public Library Director Vicki Rakowski said they had to tap their six month reserves, restarting efforts to save for big capital expenditures like a new roof and HVAC system. “For many of us, we were absolutely approaching a crisis point in that we were going to have to find a way to keep on going, either through short-term loans or reducing services. That’s just something that was unthinkable to me a couple of months ago.”
Payments came in fits and spurts, according to districts surveyed by library directors in Hillside and Mount Prospect.
Of the roughly $750,000 that Midlothian Public Library levied in taxes this year, they reported receiving about $100 on Jan. 14, $161 on the 20th, then seven payments totaling around $96,000 on the 21st. Another $37,500 came in on Jan 23. As of Jan. 30, according to the Cook County treasurer’s office, 90% of the Midlothian library levy had been distributed.
Distributions regularly fall short of levies, since not everyone pays their property taxes, and some pay late. It’s also common for distributions to be staggered and of varying sizes because distributions are made on a rolling basis as bills are paid, the treasurer’s office said.
But the timing and amounts were more unpredictable than usual this cycle, leaders told the Tribune. It was made more confusing because another key document districts rely on, distribution reports, have also been held up during the upgrade. Instead, leaders have added up bank deposit figures to keep track of what they’ve brought in.
“Nothing in life goes perfectly. I’ve been part of software or process upgrades that blew up in our faces, this is much higher stakes than any of us could fathom, the county has so many irons in the fire it’d make our heads spin, but communication goes a long way,” Rakowski said. “I have a lot of sympathy for how frustrating and difficult this must have been, but a sincere apology and a plan can solve almost anything.”
The problems have inflamed tensions among county leaders and become an issue in Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s bid for a fifth term. Her challenger, Chicago Ald. Brendan Reilly, said he would conduct a full review of the Tyler contract and recently released a campaign ad highlighting problems with it.
“We understand the frustration libraries are experiencing, and we take those concerns seriously,” Preckwinkle spokeswoman Cara Yi said in a Feb. 6 email. “While the Treasurer’s Office normally handles the communication with taxing districts, the president’s office, through the Property Tax Reform Group, has committed to improving communication with taxing districts on the overall tax bill schedule going forward.”
Meanwhile, some of the calculations have had errors that have actually left libraries with more money than they are supposed to get. Palos Heights’ Library District received $1.76 million, equal to 158% of their levy request. The treasurer’s office was not aware of the discrepancy until contacted by the Tribune last week.
“The overpayment was caused by a calculation error in the Tyler Technologies system. Tyler is now working to ensure that type of error does not re-occur,” Pappas spokesman Michael Puccinelli told the Tribune in an email.
“As of Friday morning, we still had not received enough information to determine precisely how many agencies were overpaid, but we do know the number tops 50,” Puccinelli said.
In an email, Tyler’s media team said the error amounted to “approximately 1% of the total distribution for 2024.” Based on estimates from the treasurer, that equals about $174 million.
“As soon as we became aware (Wednesday), we worked closely with the treasurer’s office and already have resolutions in some areas. The anomaly in the system has been corrected and updates provided to the client,” Tyler’s statement said.
Rather than clawing back overpayments, the treasurer will instead “adjust the amount distributed to that city from first-installment collections to rectify the overpayment,” which is a common practice, Puccinelli said.
The office said there was sufficient cash in county coffers to float that overpayment until April, when the next round of property tax bills are due. Preckwinkle has expressed confidence that there will not be any delays for bills due April 1.
Tyler is also working to create distribution reports “in the next few weeks,” Puccinelli said.
“The reporting functions that the taxing districts are requesting will actually be an enhanced feature in the new technology,” Yi said. “That’s another reason why the technology upgrade is important. Once the system is fully modernized, we can provide taxing districts with greater accountability and real time reports.”
