November 08, 2010
Cook County Clerk David Orr’s office today released the 2009 Cook County Tax Rates Report.
The Cook County Treasurer’s office also announced that property tax bills are expected to be mailed via U.S. mail on Wednesday, November 10th. Taxpayers who can’t wait for the mail will be able to look up their tax liabilities on the Treasurer’s web site beginning Wednesday. Tax bills will be due on December 13th, 2010. The first installment tax bills for 2010 will be mailed as usual at the end of January 2011 but will be due one month later than usual, on April 1, per Public Act 96-1297.
Will most taxpayers’ bills go up or down? As noted previously in this blog, it is impossible to predict what will happen to individual tax bills because of the complexity of the tax system. None of the Cook County offices involved with property taxation produces an analysis of changes in the tax bills of the over 1.8 million real estate parcels countywide so there is no average or median data available.
At the release of the 2009 tax rates report, Tax Extension Manager Bill Vaselopulos said that the only generalization that can safely be made is that local governments will not receive very much more money from taxpayers for tax year 2009. That is because the Consumer Price Index used for the purpose of tax cap calculations was only 0.1% (see the Civic Federation’s tax extension primer for an explanation of tax caps]. Non home-rule governments that did not have successful referenda were generally limited to an extension increase of only 0.1% over the prior year, plus additional amounts from any new property, TIF district expirations, or non-capped bond levy increases.
Vaselopulos reported that countywide, tax extensions for all governments increased from $11.1 billion in tax year 2008 to $11.3 billion in tax year 2009.
The negligible increase in most governments’ tax extensions means that increases or decreases in individual taxpayers’ bills will generally reflect tax burden shifts among taxpayers rather than changes in tax revenue for governments.
Who has the highest composite tax rate in Cook County? Taxpayers in Ford Heights, at 20.595%. The second highest rate is in Riverdale at 17.032%.
Who has the lowest composite tax rate in Cook County? Some taxpayers in Northfield, at 4.461%. The second lowest rate is in Chicago at 4.627%.
What effect did the 10/25 assessment change and the Assessor’s non-reassessment year reductions in suburban areas have on tax bills? These assessment reductions, and additional reductions granted by the Board of Review, were in many cases counteracted by the 13% increase in the multiplier, from 2.9786 to 3.3701.