Kaegi said he understands “the incredibly high stakes” involved in reassessing the south suburbs, given the struggles that started decades ago when industries moved out of the region and worsened during the Great Recession. He said his job is not to pick winners and losers, but to assess properties as close to their actual fair market value as possible.

“My principle is don’t inject my politics or preferences,” Kaegi said. “Be a mirror to the market, because that’s how we’re accountable.”

Kaegi contended that his predecessors did not always follow that objective principle and instead manipulated the system to achieve their desired outcomes, whether it was favoring certain property owners or shifting the burden from one type of property to another.

“The way I can do my job faithfully is to use market values to assess everyone, and that may be new, but that’s how it was always supposed to be done,” he said.

As a result, homeowners received assessment reductions ranging from about 8% to 12%, even though home sales later in the year showed prices rising significantly.

Many, but not all, businesses also received COVID adjustments. They varied from region to region, but in general, businesses hit hard by the pandemic — like hotels, offices, stores and entertainment venues — received even bigger reductions than homeowners.

The reassessment

Assessments matter because they determine how much in taxes property owners pay. In general, the higher the assessment, the bigger the tax bill.

Kaegi’s south and southwest suburban assessments mean that homeowners saw their total share of all assessed value drop by nearly 7.5% — an amount that businesses, including larger apartment buildings, would end up shouldering if the reassessments hold.

That, however, doesn’t mean businesses will end up picking up the entire 7.5% of the burden when tax bills based on those assessments are sent out this year.

Many business owners are appealing Kaegi’s reassessments. If his 2019 assessments of north and northwest suburban properties are any indication, that could reduce the shift in property tax burden, with homeowners not getting as much of a break.

The north suburban shift was 10% after assessments came out. But the Board of Review, an elected property tax assessment appeals panel, scaled back Kaegi’s work significantly. When it was done, the shift from residential to commercial was around 2.3%, according to an analysis by Kaegi’s office.

The 2020 reassessments varied depending on which part of the south and southwest suburbs a property was located. The shift was 10% in Rich Township, which includes Olympia Fields, and in Stickney Township, which includes Burbank. In Berwyn Township, the shift was only 1%.

The disparity in Rich Township concerns Jon Felix, the owner of Sell It Again, Sam, a used furniture business in Richton Park. The initial assessment went up by nearly 49%, putting a market value of nearly $652,000 on a building he bought for $406,000 in 2012, according to public records.

Felix appealed and won a reduction from the appeals board, which set the building’s market value at a little less than $556,000, still a 27.5% increase that portends a likely tax increase this year. Last year, Felix paid about $23,000 in property taxes on his building, already a steep hit for his small business.

“The biggest impediment to economic development in the Southland is the property tax burden ” Richton Park Village President Rick Reinbold said. “We have a workforce. We have transportation — the highway systems, the rail. We check all of the other boxes, except that property tax.”

But the severest criticism is coming from groups representing businesses, including the Building Owners and Managers Organization, or BOMA, and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. Both are concerned not just with Kaegi’s first rounds of reassessments in the suburbs, but also what the shifts will mean for the city of Chicago, which will be reassessed for the first time by Kaegi this year.

“What we’re concerned about is our investors are starting to look at Cook County and say, ‘Why should we do it there when we can go to DuPage County or Will County, where they don’t have those kinds of concerns? ... Or Indiana,’ ” said Michael Mulcrone, executive director of BOMA Suburban Chicago.

“We want reform, and we want better government, but is his system the best way? I don’t think so,” Mulcrone added. “I think there’s a big question about it.”

Perhaps the strongest criticism comes from Farzin Parang, executive director of BOMA Chicago, which is concerned about what will happen with assessments in downtown Chicago this year.