Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi faces suburban opponent for influential position over property taxes

Incumbent Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi finds himself in an interesting position as he tries for a third term.

His opponent in the Democratic primary is Pat Hynes, the first-term Lyons Township Assessor. Hynes also spent 23 years as a field inspector at the Cook County assessors office, including three years under Kaegi and eight under embattled former assessor Joe Berrios.

Hynes carries the endorsement of the Cook County Democratic Party, which endorsed Kaegi in 2022.

But Kaegi has been here before — he wasn’t slated by the party in 2018, either.

The outcome most likely will determine the head of the office that’s in charge of appraising the county’s land parcels and handling tax incentives, exemptions and some appeals — in other words, it has a hefty influence in the property tax process.

The race comes at a tumultuous time for many Cook County property taxpayers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kaegi modified assessments for all homeowners, based on expected unemployment and predicting market values dropping. But they instead went up while the county’s tax burden shifted away from the city’s economic center.

Commercial value has dropped as large businesses and wealthy land owners appeal assessments at higher rates — and more successfully — shifting more of the burden onto low-income home owners, according to a November Cook County treasurer’s office report and a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of five years of tax bills.

The result: property tax bills are rising fastest in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South and West sides.

Hynes called the pandemic reassessment an “unforced error,” and contended Kaegi’s proposed solution, so-called “circuit breaker” laws — versions of which have stalled in the statehouse — would be expensive and could have been avoided had the assessment stayed on track with market value in the first place.

Kaegi warned Hynes’ ascent could be a return to form for an office still marred by past corruption.

Berrios’ assessment methods often favored wealthier property owners and allowed them to pay less of a percentage of their value in property taxes than those in low-income and minority communities.

Kaegi ran as a reformer and defeated Berrios in 2018. One of his first moves after winning the fall general election was adopting a new code of ethics for the assessor’s office.

Critics on the campaign trail pointed to campaign finance records showing Hynes had taken nearly $106,500 from at least 60 different lawyers employed by firms providing property tax services, or the firms themselves, between Sept. 30 and March 11, according to campaign contribution data.

It includes $10,500 from attorney Thomas Flanagan and lawyers at his namesake Flanagan Bilton, which took over the appeals for multiple properties from crooked former Ald. Ed Burke’s law firm in 2018. Berrios later slashed proposed increases to those properties’ valuations after Flanagan’s appeal, cutting nearly $2 million from just two properties’ bills.

That’s in addition to nearly $13,000 in donations to Hynes from lawyers at Worsek and Vihon, a property tax law firm that boasts it led to recent reductions of more than $3 million for several Cook County properties.

The winner of Tuesday’s primary will head to the general election to face Libertarian Nico Tsatsoulis. In November 2022, Kaegi handily defeated Tsatsoulis with more than 82% of the vote.

Kaegi has run away with both general elections in the past, still earning more than 76% of the vote against the last Republican to run in the race, Joseph Paglia.

The 2022 primary election saw less than 20% of registered voters in the county cast ballots, and only about 60% of those who did vote that year made a decision in the assessor’s race.

This means Kaegi was re-nominated to run for a second term with only about 5% of the county’s voting-age population weighing in, and about 2.8% voting in favor of him, according to county election and Census data. And in heavily-Democratic Cook County, the primary almost always has determined the eventual winner.