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County board member urges action after presentation showing townships missed required reassessments, shifting taxes to new homeowners
Summary
Steve Aubrey told the Taxes, Election & GIS Committee that many LaSalle County townships have not completed required four-year reassessments, producing sales-ratio shortfalls and township multipliers that raise tax bills for recently built homes; members asked staff to draft a position paper on enforcement options.
Steve Aubrey, a LaSalle County board representative for District 22, told the county’s Taxes, Election & GIS Committee that Rutland Township and numerous others have not carried out statutorily required quadrennial reassessments, creating large gaps between assessed value and market sales.
"In the state of Illinois by statute, every property is to be re-evaluated every four years," Aubrey said, describing 2024 sales-ratio results that he said ranged from about 23% to 28% where the statutory target is 33 1/3 percent. He handed members spreadsheets he said show an assessed-value (AV) shortage — citing Peru as an example with an AV shortage of $1,477,100 among 121 parcels that sold in 2024.
Aubrey and other committee members warned that township multipliers applied to make up for underassessments are shifting costs onto homeowners whose properties were properly assessed. Aubrey noted Rutland Township’s 2024 multiplier was 14 percent and said that raised the effective rate to about 38 percent for some taxpayers. "All appeals have been denied," he added, saying the current appeal process provides no remedy for those who say they are being overtaxed because of the multiplier.
Deputy Assessor Vicky Alonso told the committee the countywide equalized assessed value rose 6.95 percent after board-of-review changes, and she reviewed office workloads and staffing. She also described a settlement related to a closed Holiday Inn property; she said the office reached a $31 million settlement on a property that had been assessed at $47 million and that prior auction attempts drew no bidders.
Committee members debated a range of responses. Arita Zani (District 24) said the situation is "unfair to our taxpayers" and urged the board to take action. Several members suggested legal steps, including enforcement by the state's attorney, misdemeanor fines for officials who neglect statutory duties, or structural remedies such as multi-township assessor districts or county-run assessments. Some members argued the county should consider conditioning township highway projects or other shared services on compliance to create incentives for proper reassessment.
Don Jensen, the board chairman, asked staff to prepare a position paper to outline possible next steps. "I'll follow up with Jeremiah and ask him to put together some kind of a position paper," Jensen said. The committee asked that Abby and assessor's office staff bring comparative figures showing how other counties handle reassessment and how many parcels are revalued in a given four-year cycle.
The committee did not adopt a formal enforcement action at the meeting. Members voted later in the agenda to pay the assessor’s bills and adjourned after directing staff to return with more analysis.
Next steps: staff will prepare a position paper on legal and policy options, and the assessor’s office was asked to bring comparative data from other counties to the next committee meeting.
