2017 Year in Review on the Civic Federation Blog

December 21, 2017

The following are the five most read posts presented by the Civic Federation blog in 2017. All five posts examine issues related to property taxes, school funding or both.

New and Modified Chicago Consumer Taxes in 2017
January 5, 2017

The Civic Federation annually releases a report on consumer taxes in the City of Chicago. This January blog post previewed the report by highlighting new consumer taxes approved in 2016 to take effect in 2017. The post also examined changes to several taxes that were approved in 2016.     

Calculate Your Community’s Effective Property Tax Rate
January 18, 2017

This blog post showed how to calculate your municipality’s 2014 effective tax rate in conjunction with a report published annually by the Civic Federation on Estimated Effective Property Tax Rates for selected municipalities in northeastern Illinois. The report referenced in this post examined effective tax rates through tax year 2014 (for taxes paid in 2015), which was the most recent complete data available at the time.

Update: The Civic Federation recently published an updated version of the Estimated Effective Property Tax Rates report that examines effective tax rates through tax year 2015 (for taxes paid in 2016).

The Final 2016 Cook County Equalization Factor is 2.8032
May 3, 2017

The Illinois Department of Revenue announced in April 2017 that the final equalization factor for the Cook County 2016 property assessment year (taxes payable in 2017) was 2.8032. Following the announcement, this blog post explained the significance of the 2016 equalization factor’s value in relation to the 2015 equalization factor and why Cook County uses an equalization factor in the first place.

What the New Illinois School Funding Formula Means for Chicago Public Schools
September 1, 2017

Following passage of Senate Bill 1947 in August 2017, this post explained that Illinois’ historic new funding formula would help provide some financial relief to the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) by providing hundreds of millions of additional dollars for teacher pensions and general funding. However, the post also noted that the increased funding would not pull CPS out of its liquidity and debt crisis and would likely mean a property tax hike for Chicago taxpayers.

School Districts and Property Taxes in Illinois
October 6, 2017

This blog post examined Illinois’ highest-in-the-nation number of local government units, including school districts, which rely heavily on property tax revenues for funding. As detailed in the post, Illinois has the third highest number of school districts in the country, behind Texas and California, which respectively have populations more than double and triple the total population of Illinois.