Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's budget director got illegal property tax breaks for five years

For the past five years, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s budget director has illegally gotten property tax breaks on a South Loop condo she owns but hasn’t lived in since 2019.

Annette Guzman got those tax breaks from her former boss, Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi. They've saved her $3,434 in taxes on a condo she called an investment property on the required financial disclosure statement she filed with the Cook County clerk a year ago.

Guzman and Kaegi say that, until asked by a Chicago Sun-Times reporter about the tax breaks, they were unaware she was violating state law by collecting the homeowner exemption on her investment property and also her Bronzeville home.

Illinois law allows homeowners one such exemption every year and requires them to live in the home.

Now, Kaegi’s staff has canceled the homeowner exemption on the investment property and ordered Guzman to repay $2,071.89 in tax breaks she got — not what she wrongfully failed to pay for the past five years but just for the past three years. Kaegi also waived any interest payments.

Guzman repaid the money Tuesday, according to Kaegi’s office.

“I paid what they told me to pay,” Guzman says when asked why she wasn’t ordered to repay, with interest, what she saved from each of the five illegal tax breaks she's gotten since 2020.

Kaegi’s lawyer Christina Lynch says the assessor's erroneous exemption team is now reviewing Guzman’s illegal tax breaks to determine whether she should also repay the tax breaks for the earlier two years, when she was living with her then-husband in his Northwest Side home.

After she moved out of the condo, Guzman says she went to Kaegi’s office in 2021 — the assessor says it was in 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — asking to cancel the homeowner tax exemption on her South Loop condo.

Lynch says “we never processed it.”

So Guzman kept getting the homeowner exemption on her South Loop condo as well as the Bronzeville condo, where she has lived for the past five years.

“This was an assessor error, and we have waived interest,” Lynch says.

Guzman says she didn’t know the assessor kept giving her tax breaks on the South Loop condo for two reasons: Her lender paid the property taxes with money in her escrow account, and she never changed the mailing address on those tax bills, which are still mailed to her ex-husband’s house, four years after they divorced.

Guzman, who has a law degree from the University of Chicago, bought the South Loop condo in 2007. She was living there in 2019 while she was Kaegi’s chief administrative officer, overseeing thousands of homeowner exemptions for Cook County property owners.

She says she moved out of that condo when she married Martin Guzman in September 2019, moving into his house, which also receives a homeowner exemption.

Guzman, 45, left Kaegi’s staff in January 2020 and went to work as the budget director for Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Johnson hired her as city budget director in May 2023.

Once Guzman moved out of her condo and into her husband’s home, she no longer was entitled to receive a homeowner exemption on her condo, under state law.

A year after the marriage, Guzman moved out of her husband’s home, filing for divorce in February 2021, when she disclosed she was living in a Loop apartment a few blocks north of her office as the Cook County budget director, court records show.

As the divorce was pending, Guzman refinanced her South Loop condo in March 2021, according to the mortgage filed with the Cook County clerk. She declared that the unit in the 1800 block of South State Street wasn’t owner-occupied, making it ineligible for a homeowner exemption.

“It was a rental property after I moved out from my husband’s home,” Guzman says.

She also bought a second condo in the 4000 block of South Ellis Avenue, where she now lives.

“When I purchased my home that I live in now, I went to the assessor’s office and asked to remove the homeowner’s exemption” from the South Loop condo, Guzman says.

Six months later, Cook County officials mailed the 2020 tax bill on Guzman’s South Loop condo to her husband’s address. The bill included a homeowner exemption, which cut her tax bill by $691.10. It was her first erroneous tax break since she acknowledged she moved out of the unit in 2019.

Since Guzman bought her Bronzeville condo in March 2021, she has gotten four annual tax bills on that unit and four annual bills on the South Loop condo. Each of those bills contained homeowner exemptions, cutting the property taxes on the two properties at the same time, a violation of the law that limits those exemptions to one property each year.

Over the past four years, Guzman saved a total of $2,743.49 from the homeowner exemptions on her Bronzeville home and $2,743.49 in erroneous exemptions on her South Loop home.

Altogether, records show, she got $3,434.59 in erroneous exemptions on the South Loop condo over the past five years, yet the assessor’s office told her to repay only $2,071.89. It's unclear if the assessor will order her to repay the $1,362.70 in tax breaks she got while she wasn't living in the South Loop condo.