Real estate insiders, others line up for challenger Steele

property valuations climbing by upwards of 70%. In the south suburbs, the median home assessment rose about 4%, while business and industrial properties saw a median increase of about 44%.

After taxpayers had a chance to appeal their assessments to the Board of Review and final bills were calculated by the County Clerk, the average commercial tax bill went up by 15.8% in the north suburbs, compared with residential property rising just 1.1%. The following year, homeowners in the south and southwest suburbs saw their bills rise 2.9% in the 2020 tax year compared with 2019, while commercial and industrial landowners saw bills go up by 7.2%, according to the Cook County treasurer.

Building Owners and Managers Association Executive Director Farzin Parang says Kaegi has unnecessarily villainized commercial landlords and tweaked the system to secure votes from homeowners. “We think he’s dictating a lot of assessment policy by politics.”

But Kaegi says he’s just following the market, and that his assessments are closer to their true value. A study conducted by the International Association of Assessment Officers to determine whether Kaegi’s first look at north suburban properties in 2019 were close to actual sales prices found the assessor’s numbers were “very close to 100% of market value, which indicates a sound overall appraisal.”

And a Crain’s Chicago Business analysis of 35 big commercial properties downtown suggested

Kaegi’s assessments might have actually been too low. In all but four cases, the analysis found, Kaegi’s 2021 assessments were lower than the appraised value.

Steele, a Chicago resident, has not been specific about what changes she would make to Kaegi’s formula. But she criticized his decision to tweak assessments to account for the impact of the early days of COVID-19, errors in the administration of the senior freeze program and slow response to open records requests.

Kaegi defends the COVID-19 assessments as a necessary response to pandemic’s early economic plunge. Many of the senior freeze errors, his office said, were due to problems that dated back to Berrios. And after firing the former head of records requests, his office has recently sped up its FOIA compliance.

Kaegi has also tangled with members of the elected Board of Review, a property tax appeals body that has blunted the impact of Kaegi’s reforms. In an interview with Crain’s, Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers described the 2021 cycle under Kaegi as “the worst assessment cycle that I’ve seen of any assessor that I have served with.”

Both blame each other for technological problems that are leading to tax bills being significantly delayed. It’s the kind of “chaos” that Steele says she’d end.

But much of Steele’s campaign has also been overshadowed by controversy involving her husband, Maze Jackson, whose been criticized for a history of making of antisemitic, homophobic and anti-Latino comments on the same radio show in which he’s promoted Steele’s campaign. Both Steele and Jackson have since apologized. Steele has also faced questions about Jackson’s work as a lobbyist for Onni Group, one of Chicago’s most active real estate developers of the past decade.

In a recent candidate forum, Steele said Jackson would not lobby the assessor’s office and that she would recuse herself from “anything that appears to be a conflict of interest” involving Jackson’s work.

Steele also pointed to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s hiring of its first-ever inspector general and overseeing the amendment of the body’s ethics ordinance. But current and former MWRD insiders say that while Steele supported the changes, both were longfought initiatives of former Commissioner Debra Shore. Three of Steele’s colleagues on the MWRD board have endorsed Kaegi.

Steele has floundered, at times, when asked what exactly she would change about the assessor’s practices. On a recent episode of the “Munir Muhammad Show,” she misstated the income threshold for the senior freeze exemption. And Kaegi’s office billed Steele and her mother nearly $3,500 for four years of homeowners exemptions the office says were erroneously claimed on a South Side home that Steele previously listed as her residence. Attorneys for Steele’s mother, who owns the home, are fighting it.