Fritz Kaegi

Where we stand today

Cook County assessor Fritz Kaegi came in as a reformer.  A complete unkown, he is the product of the Chicago Tribune, which week after week relentlessly wrote against the previous assessor and promoted Fritz Kaegi.  In 2022 he spent $6.5 million of his own money to get elected in a position that pays $137,500 a year!  You do the math and tell me what you think!

His strategy is simple.  He tells people that the rich had not been paying their fair share, but now they will.  He is a populist pretending to care about the poor.  He taxes middle-class residential and commercial properties to death and selectively lets specific big cats off the hook.  When these outrageous discrepancies are brought to his attention, he dismisses them with various excuses that do not make any sense.  Joe Mansueto is Fritz Kaegi's biggest donor.  Miraculously Joe is one of the few commercial property owners in the city who sees his taxes remain unchanged or reduced.  Joe owns the Wrigley building.  Taxes for the Wrigley building in 2018 when Kaegi came into power totaled $1,143,906.  Taxes in 2023 totaled $1,138,609.   Joe Mansueto also owns The Belden-Stratford in Lincoln Park.  His taxes went from $1.5M to half a million dollars!  In the meantime, my taxes on a dilapidated building in North Lawndale quadrupled.  Of course, I am not a donor of Fritz Kaegi.  Maybe I should become one.  "If you can't beat them, join them".

He refused to debate me and went into hiding for the general election in 2022, not answering emails and phone calls for debate commitments he had made.  He was forced to debate me in the primaries but when I became the only challenger remaining, he went into hiding.  At that point, I was convinced that he had something to hide.  I was one of the people, not a career politician.  I had never run for office in my life in this country nor had I ever considered doing so.  But when my assessment quadrupled in one year for a dilapidated commercial building I had bought for $195,000 and Fritz Kaegi wanted me to pay $110,000 in taxes per year, I thought I had no choice but to run against this obscene, outrageous, illogical man who had taken control of one of the most crucial functions of local government.  As I said, I was one of the people.  He should have at least been able to explain to me his rationale, why he was taxing middle-class properties to death.  But no, he chose to hide, hide so he could secure his reelection and not face the infinitesimal chance that somebody unknown and with no money could gain momentum and destroy his path to reelection.  

His boys at the Trib got to work also.  They had every local government candidate fill out a questionnaire to be published in their digital edition.  Well, almost everybody that is, except the guy running against Fritz Kaegi.  The Trib did not publish my answers to their own questionnaire that they asked me to fill out. They even refused to acknowledge that I existed, that somebody was running against Fritz Kaegi, their favorite son.  Only the Saturday before the election, when they decided to endorse Fritz Kaegi, on the day of the week with the lowest circulation, did they mention my name in passing in their endorsement of Fritz Kaegi, pretending not to understand what I was advocating.

What is Fritz up to these days?  This guy is dangerous because he is immoral.  He sees the one-party system in Cook County as a way to wane democratic institutions.  So his next scheme which took place on March 19, 2024, was to control the Board of Review, the semi-judicial board that taxpayers go to find relief from his outrageous assessments.  It's a three-member board and in 2022 he managed to elect a member.  This year his nemesis Larry Rogers Jr. is up for reelection.  So what did he do?  He took a part-time black lady clerk with only 3 years of experience as an administrative assistant at the Rich Township assessor's office, gave her $100,000 of his money and declared her a candidate for the Board of Review against Larry Rogers Jr.!  Yes, like it happens in the movies, except this is real life!  Fortunately, people caught on to his usurping tendencies and his puppet lost.

The guy does not even pretend to keep an appearance of legitimacy.  He does not seem to care if this is an outright assault on the notion of checks and balances and a fair government.  If the appeals process is controlled by the same people what is the point?  Obviously, he does not care.

It is for the US district attorney to investigate the relationship between the Chicago Tribune and Fritz Kaegi.