EDITORIAL: Legislators take another half-hearted swing at a vexing issue
May 24—Property-tax bills have been landing in local mailboxes, and their recipients have been complaining bitterly — mostly to themselves.
It's not hard to understand why.
Property taxes in Illinois are among the nation's highest, if not the highest. To call them a financial burden on ordinary homeowners is to badly underestimate how difficult it is to keep up with bills that only increase.
But never fear. Our brave legislators have a plan to — kinda, sorta — deal with the problem. They've sent legislation to Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling for an independent study of what they call a "broken system" along with recommendations to solve the problem.
If that sounds familiar, it should.
Early in his first term, Pritzker appointed a commission to study the problem and propose solutions. The result was comical in an Illinois kind of way.
Not only did the commission members never propose any solutions, they never even met. They blew off their responsibilities in the hope that voters would forget about it. That's what voters did.
So here we are again in an election year, and look what's on the agenda.
Among other things, it's another property-tax commission, a great talking point for legislative candidates trying to pacify frustrated homeowners.
Property taxes, which are based on the value of residential and commercial real estate, are levied by local taxing bodies — the more of those entities approved by voters, the higher a person's tax bill.
They include, most prominently, parks, schools, community college and library districts, as well as county and municipal governments. The largest share of a property-tax bill, generally, comes from school districts.
That should cause gastric upset for Champaign and Urbana residents who are not getting even close to the quality pubic schools they're paying for.
What is the state going to do about that? For years, legislators intermittently tried to persuade voters to accept what they called a "modest" increase in the state income tax in exchange for reduced property taxes.
Generally, what the suckers who bought that line have gotten is higher income taxes and higher property taxes.
State officials have tried to ameliorate the situation somewhat by approving a property-tax credit on state income taxes. They could increase the credit, but that would deprive state officials of revenues they've already spent 10 times over.
So what's to be done about Illinois' perverse property-tax system? Don't expect the latest commission, assuming it ever gets around to meeting, to come up with credible answers.
