The lesson for today is about taxes—property taxes, to be exact.
Others are more willing to share for the common good, but they’re too broke to keep pace with the taxman—or tax person’s—ever-increasing demands.
Cook County assessor Fritz Kaegi determines your assessment based on a computer calculation of sales of similar properties in your neighborhood.
Obviously, Ricketts’s assessment should have increased, because Big Daddy is worth more than Baby Huey. Especially since Big Daddy’s a “5,000-square-foot North Shore home nestled on a meticulously landscape lot complete with a Japanese-style garden,” as the Tribune put it.
As a result of Dardick’s articles, the county’s launched an investigation to determine whether Ricketts was being intentionally misleading. Or whether it was all just an innocent oversight, as Ricketts sees it.
A couple of years ago, Governor Pritzker got into trouble when the story broke he had removed the toilets from his Gold Coast mansion to get a lower assessment.
