Yahoo Finance Illinois county homeowners slapped with property tax bills over $10K as Walmart, Home Depot granted cuts
Cook County, Ill. isn’t just famous as the setting of CBS’s hit television show “The Good Wife.” It’s also making headlines for its property taxes.
FOX 32 Chicago spoke with several residents facing skyrocketing property tax bills, some reaching more than $10,000.
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Clarence Covington is one of those people. He said the property tax bill for his home in Madison, Ill. is $11,029.41.
“They need to stop targeting the middle class and the poor,” he told FOX 32. “Let the rich and the 1% start paying their fair share of taxes. It’s draining us ... It’s no wonder so many people are moving out of Illinois.”
The news station reports that a third of the nearly two million Cook County properties are missing exemptions on their tax bills, such as those for seniors or veterans. Other residents believe their properties were reassessed incorrectly.
Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi has another explanation. He said homeowners’ tax bills are so high all of a sudden because the taxes on commercial properties have gone down — and now residents need to make up the difference.
Retail tax cuts
According to the state government website, tax bills are based on the assessed value of a property and the amount of money the local taxing districts need to operate during the coming year.
According to Kaegi, the Cook County Board of Review has reduced assessments of commercial properties by $1 billion, leading to dramatic decreases in bills of companies like Walmart and Home Depot.
“Cuts like that added four percentage points of the tax burden on homeowners … that’s why their bills largely in the south suburbs went up more,” he said.
This means that retailers received massive discounts on their own taxes. Kaegi said a Walmart in Cicero, Illinois saw its tax bill fall by a quarter of a million dollars.
“That’s basically the size of several hundreds of people’s tax increases in Cicero,” he told FOX 32.
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He added that a Home Depot in Calumet City, Illinois saw a tax reduction of $370,000.
Hope for homeowners
Though many of the Cook County homeowners are frustrated with their large tax bills, FOX 32 offered some hope.
If you don’t qualify for a home exemption, there is another way to reduce your property tax bill: request a reassessment of your property. The assessment of your home will determine your property tax bill.
FOX 32 reports that the Cook County Board of Review received over 240,000 appeals in the last tax cycle. There were 12,240 certificates of error issued for the 2023 tax year, so it’s worth your time to try it.
“... there were thousands of errors on land values that the Assessor’s not talking about,” Commissioner of the Cook County Board of Review George Cardenastold told FOX 32. “The Board of Review has a responsibility to correct assessments.”
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