Great Article about Maria Pappas – Cook County Treasurer
Lastly, Cook County taxpayers pay 60-70 percent of an individual property tax bill to education. So, on top of the debt incurred by their village or town, they also have debt from schools, libraries, fire districts and more.
What sort of things can citizens do to address their individual concerns?
First, if I were looking to buy a home in one of the Cook County municipalities, I would go to my site and research the financial condition of the local taxing districts and make that a big factor in determining where to buy. Your principal mortgage payment won’t change much for the term of your loan, but the property taxes are sure to trend upward given recent history.
Considering that property tax revenue in Cook County is paid to 14-22 different agencies, individual, small increases result in significant financial burden.
Next, each of these local governments, by law every year, must present and vote on their budget at a public meeting. Few, if any, citizens attend these meetings to voice their concerns and opposition to the spending request. Local governments merely hold these “public” meetings as a formality in approving a budget.
Also, local governments put bond issues on the ballot to borrow money for various reasons. The voters typically don’t know what they are voting for.
Consider that in Cook County there were nine bond questions on the ballot this past November. Eight passed and only one was defeated. In contrast, there were 16 questions on the March, 2012, Primary Ballot that had to do with issuing bonds or increasing tax rates. Three passed while 13 were defeated.
Homeowners need to recognize that when they vote for a local bond deal or tax rate increase, the resulting financial debt burden may ultimately fall on their children. Don’t vote for things that both you and they can’t afford.
What sort of responsibility should the local governments take to address the issue?
There are solutions debated at the federal and state levels, but there’s no discussion about debt problems of local government. Local agencies should be made to look at their internal operations from the top down, identify ways to save money, and reduce debt.
High salaries given to local government workers greatly contribute to the strain on pension funds when employees retire from service. According to the data supplied by taxing districts, the most common average salary increase is 4.0 percent.
In Cook County, salaries have increased by as much as 90 percent since 1998 due to cost-of-living adjustments and longevity bonuses. For example, if your salary was $24,215 in 1998, you’d make $45,914 in 2013. Governments must look at personnel costs, given that 70 to 80 percent of all government expenses are personnel-related.
In the Treasurer’s Office, we cut our operational costs by millions of dollars by reducing the number of budgeted positions by 58 percent since 1998, and by applying more efficient automation and other technologies. My office also instituted self-funding revenue from commercial payers to fund our operation instead of relying on public, taxpayer sources. If we had maintained 1998’s headcount of 250, our current budget would be in the neighborhood of $27 million. Instead, our corporate budget is $3.9 million.
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