Politics
Pat Hynes on Winning Cook County Assessor Race, Easing Tax Burdens
Democrat Pat Hynes beat out Libertarian Nico Tsatsoulis in Tuesday’s election to become the next Cook County assessor.
The office is tasked with delivering accurate and transparent assessments to all residential and commercial properties.
Hynes has called the system broken and mismanaged, and vowed to fix it. Hynes spent five years as the Lyons Township assessor and brings with him more than 30 years of experience in property assessments, including two decades at the Cook County Assessor’s Office.
He joined “Chicago Tonight” to discuss his vision for the office.
On what he brings to the role:
“I’ve had thousands of taxpayer interactions and understanding what’s been driving the taxpayer crazy about how we’re executing the property tax here in Cook County. I have an understanding that each one of these numbers that we come up with, each one of these assessments, has a human on the other end. This is the most personal asset that most people will ever own: their home. People expect and deserve stable, predictable property taxes so that they can make plans so that they can absorb that property tax burden that we’re asking them to bear.”
On his main, immediate priorities for the office:
“We’re going to have to complete the outgoing assessor’s eighth assessment, so that won’t be completed, we’ll finish that. Then there’s a backlog of certificates of error that we would like to zero out. And then we have to turn around and assess the city of Chicago, which is the largest of the three triennials that we have to do. We’ve been doing a lot of preparation and planning to make sure that we hit the ground running because we want those tax bills to be out on time. It’s an incredible waste of taxpayer money when we’re late with the tax bill. So we want to make sure that we’re efficient, that we run a well-run office, that we’re dynamic in answering our taxpayers’ problems, but that we’re also able to complete our work on time.”
On providing greater transparency:
“We plan on investing in the folks that work (at the assessor’s office). I’m very excited about some of the talent that we’ve been able to attract to the office and some of the education that we’re going to offer to our frontline employees. Empowering your employees to be able to answer a taxpayer issue the first time really makes it more efficient so that you don’t have to have a taxpayer calling over and over or working for years to try and resolve a problem. Being a little more efficient will go a long way to cutting down on some of the wasteful effort that we have.”
On decreasing the tax burden for residents:
This time last year, homeowners were contending with late and higher-than-usual property tax bills. The treasurer’s office has said declining values for downtown commercial properties shifted the tax burden to homeowners, and outgoing Assessor Fritz Kaegi argued that the property tax system favors corporations and that needs to change.
“If you look at the central business district in Chicago, two-thirds of it are tied up in a TIF (tax increment financing) district, and those TIF districts really absorb wild swings in value. Just because a central business office building loses value does not necessarily translate in a one-for-one shift of that tax burden out to the neighborhoods. Now, the TIF district may end up collecting a little less money than it otherwise would. The one thing that I’m most excited about is that the lever that we have influence on as the assessor is creating an environment where we can attract capital and equity to come to our region and start building. I’m very excited that we’re going to open up the Office of Economic Development to give a little bit of clarity to those who invest in our county and get people building again because the easiest way to lower the property tax rate and the property tax burden on everyone is to have more buildings that are here in Cook County to share the burden, to help do that lifting. We have a shortage of housing in this county. We had runaway inflation in rent, and those are a supply-and-demand imbalance and those can be solved by building. I’m very excited to try and attract investment back to our county and to get people building again.”
