Our real estate tax team at Rock Fusco & Connelly, LLC continues to work hard fighting to keep your property tax bills as low as possible. We’re proud to announce that our real estate tax appeals throughout the 2020 session resulted in a sum total of $2,653,584 in tax dollar savings for our commercial and industrial property owner clients.
Cook County: As we’ve been pointing out throughout 2021, the City of Chicago is up for reassessment this year, so property owners within city limits should keep a lookout for reassessment notices. Rogers Park, Jefferson, West, North, and South Chicago have already been released and closed by the Assessor. Lake Township is currently open until December 6, with Lake View and Hyde Park still to be determined.
At a recent Innovation and Technology Committee meeting of the Cook County Board of Commissioners this week (link: https://bit.ly/2ZWRH0Q), numerous witnesses took note of the fact that the Cook County Assessor’s Office has not certified any townships yet for the 2021 assessment session – putting the Cook County Board of Review in indefinite “limbo” to open up for appeals. During the last triennial reassessment of the City of Chicago in 2018, the Board had 23 townships open for appeals by this time. Today they have none.
According to public testimony of the meeting, what’s caused the delay is unanticipated problems with the Assessor’s Office migrating the old main frame system to their new operating system. The new operating system evidently contains several glitches and is not transmitting data very well to the Board’s operating system. As a result, we’re now in November with nearly all 38 Cook County townships having opened and closed at the Assessor’s Office but without a single one having been certified by the Assessor’s Office since they opened the 2021 session in late May.
This is anticipated to cause a massive delay in adjudicating 2021 property tax assessments.
The Board of Review requires at least 10-12 months to fully adjudicate its appeals and certify its decisions (usually taking from August through May) so that second installment property tax bills can be mailed on time by July 1. As a result of this delay, the second installment property tax bills for 2021 may not get mailed out until possibly early 2023. That could set up a potential back-to-back release of second installment 2021 bills and (regularly scheduled every February) first installment 2022 bills for property owners in early 2023.
For now, property owners should anticipate first installment bills for 2021 to be mailed out in February of 2022, as per usual (the first installment is automatically 55% of the prior year’s tax bill, regardless of where it’s assessed at in the current year), but we will keep our clients posted on how the 2021 appeal session progresses as we learn more.
Rock Fusco & Connelly, LLC is here to serve all your property tax needs from appeals to exemptions to incentives. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or requests.