Democratic candidates for Cook County assessor faced off in their first televised debate Wednesday evening, trading barbs about “garbage data,” “wild swings” in property values and “pay to play” politics.
The head-to-head between two-term Assessor Fritz Kaegi and challenger Pat Hynes was notably less acidic than their meeting with the Tribune’s editorial board late last month, but still featured Kaegi accusing Hynes of being beholden to property tax attorneys and Hynes arguing Kaegi had fumbled the basics of the office, endangering home ownership.
Hynes pledged to bring an end to the “insane amount of volatility” he said has characterized Kaegi’s tenure. The office is in charge of assigning values to 1.9 million parcels across Cook County, from homes to apartment and office buildings, warehouses and data centers. Those values help determine how much of the property tax burden each taxpayer owes.
Kaegi repeatedly steered the debate back to political contributions Hynes and Kaegi’s adversaries on the county’s Board of Review received from property tax attorneys.
Sharp assessment hikes on the city’s South and West sides — and the record tax increases that followed — are evidence the office needs to focus on gathering “good, clean data” to produce more accurate and predictable assessments, Hynes said.
Residential assessments more than doubled in North Lawndale, while one part of Englewood saw the assessor’s median market values jump from $35,000 to $91,000. Coupled with large reductions to downtown trophy buildings and ever-increasing tax levies from local governments, bills that landed late last year enraged many homeowners.
“It’s unfair and it shouldn’t have happened and I’m concerned,” Kaegi said. Had his commercial assessments not been slashed by the three-member Board of Review that hears appeals, Kaegi estimated two-thirds of Chicago bills would have stayed the same or gone down.
Hynes argued without those out-of-whack neighborhood increases that swung year to year, the pain of property tax bills would not have been as acute for South and West siders. Kaegi has defended them as a reflection of boosted sales and investor activity in those neighborhoods.
Hynes began working in the assessor’s office in 1998 — including many years in the field inspection department that checks out properties in person — and stayed until 2020, when he quit under Kaegi.
He was elected township assessor for Lyons in 2021. Hynes has some political wind at his back: the endorsement of the Cook County Democratic Party, several South and West Side aldermen and suburban township assessors, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, Attorney General Kwame Raoul and the Chicago Federation of Labor.
Kaegi first won election in 2018, capitalizing on a Tribune and ProPublica investigation finding widespread errors in assessments under predecessor Joe Berrios.
He painted Hynes as a return to the Berrios era, highlighting donations Hynes received from a stable of Berrios-allied property tax appeals attorneys and appraisal firms, including a recent $1,500 one from the former tax appeal law partner of convicted former House Speaker Mike Madigan.
“I’ve never taken a dime” from property tax appeals lawyers, Kaegi repeated multiple times. “That was the pay-to-play culture that was in our office before.”
Hynes has called that a “false choice,” and has previously noted Kaegi can only afford to swear off such donations because of his personal wealth. Kaegi has still accepted money from real estate developers. Over the years, the former asset manager has given $5 million to his campaign fund and also donated tens of thousands to an opponent of longtime Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr.
Among the most pressing post-Berrios problems were over-assessments of lower-value properties and under-assessments of high-value ones. Kaegi pointed to a recent University of Chicago study to note he’d made significant progress on the fairness of residential assessments. The more politically testy task has been valuing office buildings, stores and warehouses. Berrios left those assessments untouched for several years.
Kaegi’s fixes have made him an enemy of many big real estate interests and several members of the county’s Board of Review. Both have questioned Kaegi’s methods, noted widespread vacancies in office buildings and argued several sales for losses justified lower valuations and subsequent tax breaks.
An independent 2024 study commissioned by the county found Kaegi had in fact undershot commercial assessments compared with their sale prices in the northern suburbs in 2022. That figure was pushed lower and further away from industry standards by the board. Kaegi initially overvalued similar properties in Chicago the next year, but appeals brought them closer to their true sale price. His 2020 commercial assessments in the south suburbs hit the mark, but after commercial taxpayers appealed, the value was brought down to 81% of their sale price.
Kaegi’s efforts to pass state legislation to get his hands on more data about property characteristics and income have come up short.
Hynes said one of his chief goals was to create an office of economic development to help investors estimate their future assessment and “pencil out whether it’s a go or a no-go for that investment and to get people building again in this county.”
Updating property record cards containing descriptions for the millions of homes across the county is another to-do for Hynes. Though it would be a massive and costly undertaking, it would help avoid “garbage data” informing the office’s models and keep up with new construction and renovations, he argued. As township assessor, Hynes said he’s often “left to clean up the mess” from Kaegi’s office by helping taxpayers sort out errors.
“When things aren’t going well, when you get volatile assessments that come out of the county assessor’s office, when you constantly meet taxpayers who are at risk of losing their home, and some frankly, who have lost their home, I’m passionate about making sure that we get this assessment right,” he said.
After leaving Kaegi’s office, Hynes and other former employees became missing property hawks, gathering lists of tear-downs and new build homes and businesses that Kaegi’s office hadn’t updated on the rolls and tallying the estimated lost value. A Tribune and Illinois Answers Project investigation affirmed 620 properties — hundreds flagged by Hynes and his office — were not properly logged by Kaegi, despite his office having access to sales data, aerial photographs or permits for new construction.
The office has since fixed the vast majority of the parcels the investigation identified, improved its permit review process and hired more field inspection staff.
Throughout, Kaegi has argued commercial cuts make a much bigger difference to taxpayers’ final bill and that the missing properties made little difference on the countywide burden.
He has hope for a pared-down “property characteristics” bill passing in Springfield and says he and the board are tackling a series of data-sharing recommendations to inform their work from a study last year.
