Tax Bills, Vacancies, and New AI Unit Discussed on Second Day of Mid-Year Budget Meetings

Cook County Board Finance Committee
Mid-year Budget Meetings on July 26, 2023
with Assessor, Public Defender, State’s Attorney, Clerk of the Court, Treasurer, and Secretary to the Board

Assessor - Fritz Kaegi

• Current priorities are to (1) finish reassessing the southern and western suburbs, (2) work with the other County offices involved with the property tax bills – Board of Review, Clerk, and Treasurer -- to get everyone off the main frame, and (3) execute the office’s hiring plan to fill vacancies.  Regarding the latter, the office will have brought on board 43 people, but expects to have 39 remaining vacancies by the end of the fiscal year.  It is taking the Assessor’s HR department about 70 days from the time of job posting to onboarding a person, which is significantly less than the Bureau of Human Resources under the President.,
• Says that office will finish its reassessment work 2 months earlier than last year, though the office is still behind timeline from pre-Covid years.  Bills are expected to go out by Nov. 1, a month earlier than last year, but 4 months later than the goal of July.  Assessor said the working group of reps from the tax offices led by the President’s office has made a lot of progress and everyone is working diligently to get the timing of tax bills back on track for 2024.
• One of the issues that remains is the interface between the Tyler system in use by the Assessor and the system on the main frame used by the Board of Review.  To make the interface work requires extra time, which is why filling vacancies is so important. 
• Assessor touted the new system, saying processing appeals in the Assessor’s office is taking half the time it used to.  Assessor said that the improvements the office has made in doing accurate assessments can be seen in the reduction in the number of appeals during the last 4 years from about 500,000/year to 300,000/year.  Assessor also said that his web site has all the information as to how the assessments were arrived at.
• Both Comm. Britton and Gainer raised the need for the Assessor and Board of Review to utilize the same criteria for assessment.  

State’s Attorney-  Kimberly Foxx

• To deal with retention in order to eliminate vacancies, the office has a policy allowing remote work 2 days a week, retention bonuses have just started, and the parental leave policy in the office was just updated 2 weeks ago.  In addition, for the first time, the office is doing exit interviews to understand why people leave.  A salary study is underway, comparing internally as well as externally to other governments.
• The State’s Attorney will provide the number of days from job posting to onboarding, but knows it is much less than the Public Defender’s office which takes 150 days.  The Public Defender uses the Bureau of Human Resources; the State’s Attorney has its own HR department.
• The expunging of criminal records for marijuana use has been completed.  Over 15,000 records.

Clerk of the Court - Iris Martinez

• Touted the accomplishments of being found to be in substantial compliance with Shakman; new web site receiving awards; fully implementing the Odyssey case management system as of December 2022; initiating a Customer Service Call Center as of June 2023, which is handling about 1200 calls/day; and the expected roll-out of an online case search in August.
• Explained that revenues from the office are down due to the number of court fee waivers that judges are giving.  But that means less burden on those going to court.
• While vacancies are listed as 364, the Clerk said the true number is 207.

Treasurer - Maria Pappas

• Treasurer started with good news:  expects to have $35 M more in revenues for late payments over what were budgeted. The County’s payment plan for property taxes is 1.5% per month, which may be incentivizing late payments.  The office is going to be issuing a study soon on who is paying late and why.
• Treasurer announced the development of a new Artificial Intelligence Unit in the office.  She will provide more details about that during the budget meetings in October to support the need for more programmers.
• Comm. Britton asked about online payments because of people who have mailed checks for property taxes that have been stolen.  Treasurer said there are about 75,000 online payments.  When her office learns of stolen checks, it contacts the banks which often can discover through videos who cashed the check.

Secretary to the Board - Lynne Turner

• Office has 12 positions, 6 of which are currently vacant (!) including the Archived Manager.
• Nevertheless, the office is still supporting 102 public bodies, 1500 public speakers a year, and 500 meetings a year.  Hope to roll out closed captioning on the videos/streaming soon.  
• The new Board room is likely still 2 years away.  Would like to utilize electronic voting, but currently haven’t found a system that could accommodate Commissioners attending remotely.  Secretary would like to implement because currently the office has to hand type all motions and votes into the online system after meetings.

Observer: - Priscilla Mims