The Democratic primary contest for Cook County assessor pits a two-term millionaire running on systemic reform against a dynastic party-backed challenger who says those changes have led to chaos and skyrocketing bills for taxpayers.
Incumbent Assessor Fritz Kaegi and Pat Hynes are fighting for control of the office that sets valuations of more than 1.8 million parcels across the county, a key component to calculating annual tax bills.
Hynes has seized on anger over spikes to South and West Side assessments and bills last year, the hundreds of new or renovated properties Kaegi’s office failed to catch during the pandemic, and other assessment or exemption errors Hynes personally worked to correct as a suburban assessor since 2021.
Hynes has the support of the Cook County Democratic Party, the Chicago Federation of Labor, building trade unions and the Building Owners and Managers Association, which represents the local office building industry.
Kaegi, meanwhile, says his challenger would take the office’s ethics backwards, citing Hynes’ roster of campaign donors, which includes several property tax appeals attorneys and appraisers. The donations are not only an ethical problem, he said, but a signal that Hynes’ practices would be more favorable toward big businesses.
“You can’t be taking donations in the morning and then hearing people’s appeals for reductions in the afternoon,” Kaegi told the Tribune.
His campaign has also faulted Hynes for misleading statements about the office’s improvements and Kaegi’s own home bill.
Though the assessor’s office relies heavily on data and modeling, its conclusions, outside appeals and internal policies can drastically change values and make the office’s political tightrope shaky. Lowering assessments for certain classes or neighborhoods pushes more of the property tax burden on other taxpayers.
With a budget of $43 million and a staff of 315, the assessor’s mission is to set values as close as possible to what homes, businesses and lots can fetch on the open market.
In his first race in 2018, Kaegi emphasized the importance of calling balls and strikes, not favoring one property class over another. Now, he presents himself as a forceful advocate for homeowners and has fought to boost assessments on big downtown buildings, arguing they have long been under-assessed.
Over the years, Kaegi told the Tribune said he’s seen “how all the different things that might look objective on their face end up punishing homeowners” with less time or money to appeal than big businesses, or who are unaware of available exemptions.
Going after big fish — data centers or office buildings fighting for tens of millions in reductions — is a better bang for the buck, he argues. “We’ve talked about, ‘Should we triple our workforce for building inspectors, or should we substantially increase the analyst staff that goes and defends our assessments at the Board of Review?’ The latter would have much more significant impact on an average homeowner.”
He’s been able to push that message and forego contributions from appeals lawyers and appraisers by self-funding. In all, he’s chipped in $7.1 million to his own campaign since the 2018 cycle – $1.5 million since January alone. Among his endorsers is AFSCME, the union that represents workers in his office.
He’s also used that money to try to oust opponents on the Board of Review. It’s a practice he previously swore off, arguing it was inappropriate to try to influence elections for a board that checks his assessments. But “exceptional” circumstances led him to fund an unsuccessful campaign challenger to commissioners Larry Rogers Jr. in 2024 and George Cardenas’ opponent this year.
Hynes and his supporters say Kaegi has not taken accountability for the office’s problems, ranging from miscalculations in the south and west suburbs in 2024 to missing new or renovated properties. A handful of South and West Side elected officials backed Hynes after last year’s bills landed, casting doubt on the massive hikes to home values Kaegi set in neighborhoods like Englewood and North Lawndale. Though Kaegi’s office said those values mirror sales prices and elected officials were briefed on looming assessment hikes, several said they were caught off guard and skeptical their homes could sell at the values Kaegi set.
At an endorsement press conference for Hynes last month, former congressman Bobby Rush, once a Kaegi endorser, said Kaegi “keeps blaming everybody else when the problem rests solely with him.”
A longtime staffer in the unit in the assessor’s office tasked with inspecting new and renovated properties, Hynes previously told the Tribune he quit midway through Kaegi’s first term over frustrations with operations, including fewer inspections.
Hynes comes from a family with deep roots in Cook County politics. His uncle, Thomas C. Hynes, was one of the most influential Democrats in Chicago, president of the Illinois Senate, a top member of the Democratic National Committee and 19th Ward Democratic committeeman. Most notably, he was county assessor from 1979 to 1997.
Thomas Hynes’ sons are Dan Hynes and Matt Hynes, the former serving at various points as state comptroller and deputy governor to JB Pritzker, and the latter as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s chief lobbyist.
After working in the assessor’s office since 1998, Pat Hynes was elected in 2021 to be Lyons Township assessor, a position in which he served as a taxpayer advocate helping with exemptions, assessment errors and permits.
He’s raised $2.3 million in campaign funds in his bid to unseat Kaegi over the past year and nearly $1 million since the start of this year alone, with major support from unions that rely on construction jobs, and from investor Michael Sacks and One Future Illinois PAC.
Kaegi has taken particular issue with the $140,000 in donations Hynes has accepted from property tax appeals attorneys, arguing it undermines his credibility as a fair arbiter of value. Hynes’ team is quick to point out Kaegi takes money from real estate developers and investors.
Hynes raised the alarm about missing properties in his home turf of Lyons Township — lots with new homes, for example, that were assessed as if they were vacant — and began hunting down others across the county. What he found, he said, was evidence of operational failures under Kaegi that could cost homeowners thousands in back taxes and cause an unfair distribution of the tax burden.
In all, a Tribune and Illinois Answers Project investigation found Kaegi’s office had missed 620 new or renovated properties across the county. Kaegi’s office said such errors were rare and fixing them had a small impact on others’ bills. The office blamed technological and organizational issues while pointing the finger at municipal leaders who failed to forward permit information to trigger an inspection.
Kaegi argues he’s delivered on his main campaign promises, pointing to a recent University of Chicago study that concluded residential assessments have become more fair during his tenure and a separate study finding appeals to the board made assessments less accurate. That same commercial study found suburban businesses were assessed too low compared with their actual sale prices between 2020 and 2022, and that appeals to the Board of Review pushed them lower. It also found Kaegi initially assessed Chicago commercial properties too high in 2021.
He’s successfully advocated for creating new incentives for affordable housing construction and automatically renewing a program that freezes property values for some seniors, heading off big bill spikes from rising property values.
Other reform efforts from Kaegi to get better data or offer relief for homeowners have come up short. He has failed for years to convince state lawmakers to pass a state data modernization bill compelling commercial properties to give up more information about their buildings. He has hopes for more modest legislation this year.
A “circuit breaker” program Kaegi supports, giving tax credits to low-income homeowners with big bill spikes, has also failed to find footing in Springfield amid tight budgets. And the push from Kaegi and other county assessors to get federal appraisal records to provide better property characteristic data for local homes has also taken years.
Hynes’ focus on missing properties and rising bills is a prominent part of his campaign website, which includes a map of over 700 properties worth $1.7 billion “that is not on the tax rolls.”
A Tribune review of the pins as of mid-February found all but 42 were already caught and accurately updated on the assessor’s current rolls. Kaegi’s office said all 42 were either due for a field inspection or were in the process of being updated.
Asked to respond to the characterization that the 700 properties were currently “missing,” Hynes spokeswoman Becky Carroll said in an email the locations’ popups “clearly show when the property was built and when it was finally assessed,” and the map was meant to demonstrate lost tax values from prior years that the county can’t recoup because of Kaegi’s errors.
Kaegi’s campaign has in turn highlighted an error from Hynes’ camp: a social media ad with Micaela, identified as a homeowner from the village of Lansing who holds her bill and says “my property taxes have doubled.”
Kaegi campaign spokesman Louis Di Paolo called the ad an “abject lie” and noted records show the woman in the ad, Micaela Smith, does not own the home nor has the property tax bill doubled. Smith is a village trustee also running for state representative. At its lowest point during Kaegi’s tenure, the home’s total bill for 2022 was $9,470, according to treasurer records. It climbed to $11,978 in 2023 and $12,809 in 2024.
In an emailed statement, Smith said she is her parents’ caregiver and pays their taxes, “and if I wasn’t in the picture, my parents would never be able to stay in their home or cover the property tax hikes that ballooned under Kaegi.”
The ad’s “doubling” language, Carroll said, is meant to refer to Smith’s spike in monthly escrow costs, which include principal, interest, taxes and insurance. “Many other taxpayers in the Southland have communicated the same thing at the same time,” Carroll said.
The Hynes campaign has also defended an ad that calls Kaegi’s assessment of his own home into question. In 2023, the Tribune reported Kaegi’s assessment dropped while others in the neighborhood climbed. But that’s because Kaegi tattled on himself in 2020, requesting an inspection to make sure a 700 square foot addition was included in his value. That shot his assessment up to $1.1 million, the highest of its class in the neighborhood.
His bill rose because of that 2020 change from about $28,000 in 2019 to nearly $43,000. After his home’s assessment dropped slightly in 2023, Kaegi’s bill fell to just over $36,000 — still among the highest among similar properties in his neighborhood.
Hynes said the sudden increase to Kaegi’s home assessment was out of line with the neighborhood and the resultant break was unfair, an example of the volatility of Kaegi’s assessments.
“Predictability” is Hynes’ refrain. He promises to not only clean up the office’s “garbage” data by updating internal records to better reflect conditions on the ground, but also launch an economic development office that would offer developers an estimate of their tax burden so they can underwrite construction loans.
“If you’re going to build a 200,000-square-foot warehouse, 1,000-square-foot warehouse. There’s no reason that the county assessor can’t model that for you, give you a score,” he said at a mid-February forum hosted by the Civic Federation. Hynes hopes fresh “confidence in the market” will usher in more investment, bringing in new properties to further spread out the tax burden.
“We are chasing away investment,” he said. “We’re closing small businesses that have to operate in the margins, and we’re causing homeowners, frankly, to lose their homes outside the margins.”
