Politics
Cook County Assessor Candidate Pat Hynes on Property Taxes, His Vision for the Office
Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi on Tuesday night conceded defeat to Pat Hynes, a one-time employee of the incumbent’s office, in the Democratic primary.
Hynes took the lead with a platform of providing accurate assessments and restoring trust and economic development. He will now face off against Libertarian Nico Tsatsoulis in the Nov. 3 general election. No Republican filed to run in the race.
Hynes joined “Chicago Tonight” on Wednesday to reflect on his win and the future of his campaign.
On why his campaign resonated with voters:
“I think that there’s an abject frustration with the way property taxes are going right now in Cook County, coupled with our authenticity. You know, we worked very hard to communicate with as many voters as possible. I think the fact that I’ve had 30 years of experience, ... I think that authenticity really resonated with the voters we talked to.”
On what an assessor does:
“In the city of Chicago we’ve got about $8.9 billion of a property tax burden and in the suburbs a little over $9 billion, so the role of the county assessor is to have a fair and equitable distribution of that burden. The burden remains relatively fixed, and so our job is to value every property in the district and figure out the way to divvy up that burden according to the market value of every property.”
On fixes he is looking to implement:
“Well, No. 1 is cleaning up that data. You have to have a good handle on what the built environment is in this county if you’re going to produce an accurate assessment and we just don’t have that right now. ... You can’t have that kind of error rate in your underlying data if you plan to produce an assessment that’s credible.”
On what property owners should expect:
“They should expect an awful lot less volatility — when you have data that’s not accurate, you change your rubrics, you get a result that’s all over the board and that’s the experience that taxpayers have had in the last eight years. ... They have wild swings in their assessment, wild swings in their resultant property tax burden, yet they haven’t had wild swings in appreciation in their property to match the wild swings in the value. And that’s why taxpayers are really frustrated with what’s happening right now. And as boring as it is, it’s really important to get the data right to get the assessment right.”
On divvying the tax burden:
“We have to capture value according to the law. We have to divvy the tax burden according to the law. And we need to do it in a way that’s predictable, so our taxpayers aren’t finding surprises, they’re not having problems bearing that burden, because you know frankly in Illinois the property tax burden is robust. And we do have to make sure that we aren’t putting our homeowners out of their homes, we’re not pushing our small business owners out of their businesses.”
On what comes next:
“We’ll take a little bit of a break and reset, but we’ll be back out there, we’ll be communicating with the taxpayers, with the voters and we’re gonna make sure that we are successful in November, so that we’re well positioned in December to bring justice to our taxpayers, to bring some sanity back and remove a lot of that volatility that has been frustrating our taxpayers for too long.”
