Property taxes are confusing. Sometimes bedeviling.
The second installment property tax bills which hit most Oak Park mailboxes just before the 4th of July are both those things.
For about one-third of Oak Park property owners they’ve seen their property taxes actually fall from a year ago. One-quarter of property owners have had hikes of less than 10%. And for the unlucky 40%, mainly those in larger homes, they’ve been officially clocked with increases of 20% or more.
To make sense of all this, Ali ElSaffar, the longtime Oak Park Township Assessor, has penned a One View in this week’s Journal laying out the complicated equation that brings us to this moment.
First, he writes, this installment of property taxes reflects the high inflation levels we saw in 2022. That pandemic-related hike allowed most local taxing bodies to increase their take to the maximum of 5% tax allowed. Note that Oak Park’s village government stuck to its self-imposed limit and raised its tax burden by just 3%.
Those higher-than-usual hikes averaged out to a 6.2% increase in tax money actually going to local taxing bodies.
Second, Oak Park is feeling the direct impact of the Cook County Assessor’s recent triennial reassessment of local properties. That reassessment increased the taxable value of all Oak Park property by nearly 30%. That’s a good news/bad news outcome. It is good that the overall value of our collective properties rose. But if within that process the value of your specific property increased significantly, you are now on the hook to pay a greater proportion of the total tax bill in town.
Oak Park is fortunate to have ElSaffar as the local assessor. He is able to translate what is exceedingly complicated into language that makes sense to the highly-taxed masses.
We’ll close out on the big picture. Oak Park’s taxes are high. This is an expensive town to run. The infrastructure is old. The ambitions in our complex schools are high. The commercial tax base is limited and there is, by choice, no industry. And over decades we had too many elected officials who did not focus on containing costs.
That has changed some. The village government, which gets only a modest share of property taxes but puts a fee on everything that moves, has shown true restraint on that revenue stream. Oak Park and River Forest High School was long the greediest and least self-aware of its toll on property taxpayers. Its cash reserve reached well above $100 million at its peak and alienated a lot of its constituents. Over the past decades it has taken intentional steps to lower that reserve and to limit pay hikes for teachers to more sustainable levels.
But property tax saturation is a real thing in Oak Park. A shock to the system as felt right now by 40% of our neighbors is a moment to remember that these are real people, working hard to make their way, who get stung when these tax payments come due.