With property tax bills still stinging across Chicago’s South and West Sides, a lineup of aldermen, pastors, and former U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush packed into the IBEW Local 134 hall in Bronzeville on Thursday to make one thing clear: they want Lyons Township Assessor Pat Hynes to replace two-term Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi.
Backers framed the endorsement as a direct response to sharp property tax spikes in majority Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Hynes, leaning into that anger, cast his campaign as a return to steadier, inspection-driven assessments and pledged to pour more office resources into updating property records instead of relying so heavily on modeling from behind a desk.
Several aldermen, including South Side members Stephanie Coleman and David Moore and West Side representatives Red Burnett and Jason Ervin, joined Hynes at the podium. Organizers billed the event as a show of political force by Black elected officials and clergy ahead of the March primary, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Why Supporters Rallied
Hynes labeled recent assessment hikes a “breaking point” for many homeowners and accused Kaegi of “pushing people out of their homes,” remarks published in the Tribune. Supporters at the hall pointed to sticker-shock bills and what they describe as uneven treatment on exemptions and appeals as proof the office needs a different approach focused on neighborhood stability and more aggressive field inspections.
Errors, Corrections And The $489 Million Fix
Reporting by the Illinois Answers Project identified at least 620 new or renovated properties that were misclassified for the 2023 tax year. The errors produced a conservative estimate of hundreds of millions of dollars in missed taxable value before they were caught.
Kaegi’s office later corrected many of those records and added roughly $489 million in taxable property value back onto the rolls as fixes were processed, according to Illinois Answers. The episode has become Exhibit A for critics arguing the system is both high stakes and highly technical, and that mistakes can quietly snowball into very real tax shifts.
Numbers Fueling The Fight
Kaegi’s team stresses that the office processed more than 1.5 million property tax exemptions for homeowners last year, a number used to bolster the claim that the assessor has been aggressive about outreach and relief, according to the Cook County Assessor’s Office.
Still, county reporting shows the median Chicago homeowner’s tax bill jumped about 16.7 percent in the most recent cycle, a record-sized percentage increase that has supercharged the politics around the office, according to WBEZ. That spike is the backdrop for Hynes’s pitch that it is time for a course correction and for Kaegi’s argument that his reforms are being unfairly blamed.
Kaegi Pushes Back On Ethics And Causes
Kaegi’s campaign has pushed its own narrative on why homeowners are hurting. The assessor has argued that much of the pain can be traced to large reductions in downtown commercial assessments at the Board of Review, a shift he says translated to roughly a half billion dollars of levy reductions landing on homeowners instead.
His campaign has also highlighted recent contributions to Hynes from property tax appeal firms and appraisers, calling them a potential conflict of interest and warning that a Hynes win would undermine “ethics and accountability” reforms. Hynes has rejected that framing and points instead to his record of local taxpayer advocacy, according to reporting on the exchanges.
What Voters Should Watch
The Democratic primary is scheduled for March 17, 2026, which gives both camps a relatively short runway to sell their story of what went wrong and who can fix it. The contest is likely to hinge on some decidedly unglamorous issues: how well the office captures new permits, how many inspectors are actually in the field, how exemptions are processed and how appeals are handled.
Layered on top of those mechanics are the optics of donations, endorsements and who is standing beside whom in neighborhoods still recovering from their latest tax bills. Expect both Hynes and Kaegi to lean hard on their preferred numbers and local validators as they battle over who gets to run one of the most quietly powerful offices in Cook County.
