Pat Hynes: Fritz Kaegi 2.0

Where we stand today

Defeated Cook County assessor Fritz Kaegi came in as a reformer.  A complete unkown, he was 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 was simple.  He teld people that the rich had not been paying their fair share, but now they would.  He was a populist pretending to care about the poor.  He taxed middle-class residential and commercial properties to death and selectively let specific big cats off the hook.  When these outrageous discrepancies were brought to his attention, he dismissed them with various excuses that did not make any sense.  Joe Mansueto was Fritz Kaegi's biggest donor.  Miraculously Joe is one of the few commercial property owners in the city who saw 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 was not a donor of Fritz Kaegi.  Maybe I should have 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 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.

But the Tribune hated my intervention and my trying to unseat their golden boy.  So when I ran for Commissioner of the Board of Review in 2024 they smeared me, lied about me and called me clueless in their editorial page!  Chris Jones and his lackeys were really annoyed with my presence.

Fritz Kaegi was defeated by Pat Hynes at the Democratic primary.  It will not make one iota of difference.  Pat Hynes will be constrained by the same excessive levies and will use the same subjective system to derive assessments.  Homeowners will despair again being unable to pay the outrageous property taxes.  Unless the levies come down and until the assessor implements an objective method for deriving assessments, Cook County property owners will be paying the same unpredictable, arbitrary and exorbitant property taxes!