OPINION
Op-Ed: The Sun-Times Misleads on Kaegi A series of investigative stories attempt to paint Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi as incompetent or corrupt, but lean on exaggeration and tabloid framing. BY CURTIS BLACK
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s Fritz Kaegi a reformer? Or is he really an incompetent bungler—or worse, doing favors for the likes of Donald Trump, Mike Madigan, and mob boss Joey Lombardi—as the headlines for a recent series of Chicago Sun-Times investigations suggest? Kaegi was elected Cook County assessor in 2018 in an upset over incumbent Joe Berrios, who also chaired the Cook Cook Democratic Party at the time. Berios’s assessments were shown by multiple independent analyses to be biased against low-income communities and small businesses, and Kaegi promised to fix that. So far, research shows that he has consistently brought his valuation of large commercial properties closer to market rates, which will reduce the relative tax burden on homeowners. So it was notable when a series of investigative articles in the Sun-Times appeared to promise tales of scandal and corruption in the assessor’s office. The articles themselves focused on a small number of errors in administering property tax exemptions, most of them dating to previous administrations. It takes close attention to realize that the real story, that of a reformer striving to correct problems that have festered for years, was being obscured in a cloud of insinuation and falsely framed to make the reformer look like a hack. The headlines certainly blared: “Tax Program Riddled with Errors and Lax Oversight,” “Kaegi Botched COVID Tax Relief,” and “Cook County Assessors Gave Tax Breaks to a Dead Mobster.” The layouts bristled with photos of fancy homes and personal financial details that recall a gossip magazine’s survey of who makes how much. Two separate articles last year
featured pictures of a Gold Coast couple apparently chosen by Sun-Times editors to represent people who benefited from mistakes in administering a senior tax break. Both stories devoted several paragraphs to detailing the couple’s spending habits and included an old photo of the pair with big hair and loud formalwear “at a gala in the 1990s,” presenting them as the kind of rich folks that Kaegi, elected on a promise to improve equity, is really helping. That particular exemption program, designed to shield longtime residents from the effects of gentrification on tax rates, is one of eight exemptions available to Cook County homeowners. The deeper story may be that state legislators love showering their constituents with such minor goodies, rather than addressing larger budget problems that force local school districts to carry most of the cost of public education, thus giving Illinois some of the highest property tax rates in the country. And that with 1.8 million properties to assess in Cook County, those exemptions are virtually impossible to administer with 100 percent accuracy. But while the Sun-Times mentions the role state legislators played in creating this complicated system, the stories zero in on and amplify the significance of the small number of errors Kaegi’s office made. According to the Sun-Times, “officials admit the program is riddled with errors,” and Kaegi’s office “admits it’s made numerous errors” calculating exemptions. (Kaegi’s office took issue with that characterization in a subsequent blog post, though you wouldn’t have learned that from the Sun-Times, which repeated the framing in story after story.) It’s not hard to visualize the TV ads using headlines from the series to attack
Kaegi. And his opponents know that— they jumped right on the story. County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, a longtime Berrios supporter, attacked Kaegi over “major errors” in the program. And Kari Steele, a challenger to Kaegi who’s backed by the city’s commercial property association, cited the article when she announced her candidacy, saying, “A SunTimes investigation revealed that [Kaegi] badly mismanaged the senior citizen tax rates program.” The facts about the true scope of the program’s problems only trickled out long after the big splash. The Sun-Times formulation, repeated in several stories, seemed designed to exaggerate the problem: “The Sun-Times examination of the freezes on 144,000 residential properties found the tax breaks shifted $250 million onto other property owners even though the freezes often were incorrectly calculated.” Indeed, the assessor’s office noted in a blog post that following the story, “Some have asked whether this entire $250 million figure is money that is going to people who do not qualify.” It isn’t. It’s only in a second editorial two weeks after the initial article—after a first editorial which said only “the dollars involved are high,” once again citing the $250 million figure—that we learn that the assessor’s office has determined “senior freezes were improperly granted using an outdated formula to no more than 0.2% of the 144,000 properties” that get the exemption. The cost of faulty exemptions to other property taxpayers? “Less than $1 and probably a lot less.” In fact, a lot less. In its blog post, the assessor’s office wrote that of the tens of thousands of senior freezes exemptions, about 150 were incorrectly calculated.
That cost average taxpayers about one or two cents on their tax bill. Taking that analysis at face value, that’s hardly a program “riddled with errors.” And it’s quite a stretch to say the exemptions were “often” incorrectly calculated when roughly one in a thousand were erroneous—and the cost to taxpayers was virtually nil. Subsequent stories repeated the pattern: lurid headlines and framing attacking Kaegi, and facts which don’t back up the hoopla. In September, under the headline “Trump Gets $300K Tax Break,” the paper reported that the former president got a property tax cut because Kaegi had “slashed” the assessment of vacant retail space in the Trump Tower downtown. It wasn’t until halfway through the story that it was revealed that Trump’s tax bill is actually higher than it was under Berrios. With more diligence than a newspaper article should require, a reader could piece together the real story together from facts scattered more or less randomly through the Sun-Times piece. What actually happened is that, in 2020, Kaegi doubled the assessed value of the vacant space, bumping Trump’s tax bill up to $1 million. Trump’s attorneys appealed the assessment but didn’t file correctly, so his appeal was rejected. Last year they appealed again, correctly this time, and his tax bill was reduced based on a valid vacancy claim. But because Kaegi had tightened up the policy on assessing vacant retail space—a property can now receive an assessment reduction equivalent to only half its vacancy rate—Trump’s tax bill is now about $200,000 higher than three years ago. Any way you cut it, Trump is paying JUNE 16, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
