A public comment at a Cook County Board of Commissioners meeting produced one of the more memorable recent examples of a citizen cutting through the performative politics of Cook County governance. Jessica Jackson, co-founder of the Chicago Flips Red activist group, used her allotted time to challenge the room full of commissioners and their allied nonprofit representatives on two fronts simultaneously: mocking the claim that Black voting rights are under threat from redistricting or voter ID requirements, and demanding to know why none of the Black residents being mobilized to testify about alleged threats to their vote were instead testifying about the federal case filed the previous Monday accusing Cook County of illegally stealing property through predatory tax sales.
Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss the property tax case and other Illinois policy developments.
Glennon said Jackson nailed it, and that the property tax foreclosure issue has been building for well over a year. The core problem is that Cook County has been confiscating entire properties through forced tax sales without compensating owners for the equity value that far exceeds the amount of unpaid taxes, a practice courts have repeatedly signaled is unconstitutional. On May 11th, a federal judge found Cook County liable for damages to taxpayers who lost their properties under Illinois’s property tax collection scheme. The general assembly had ample time to correct the practice by statute and did nothing, which Glennon called flagrant nonfeasance. He said this is simply the latest iteration of a consistent pattern in which Cook County, the City of Chicago, and the State of Illinois act in predatory rather than protective ways toward the citizens who fall behind, treating the situation not as a problem to be resolved equitably but as an opportunity for government to capture maximum value at the citizen’s expense. He said the equity-stealing operates on two tracks simultaneously: when governments are not confiscating equity through forced tax sales, they are confiscating it through confiscatory property tax assessments, giving homeowners no escape in either direction.
On chronic absenteeism in Chicago Public Schools, Glennon noted that approximately forty percent of CPS students miss ten percent or more of school days without a valid excuse, a figure that should theoretically trigger reductions in state funding since Illinois school aid is calculated based on average daily attendance. The Illinois State Board of Education resolved that problem with characteristic creativity by deleting the term chronic absenteeism from its accountability framework and eliminating any negative grade consequence for schools whose students fail to show up. Under the new structure, schools receive funding regardless of whether students attend, with a modest bonus available if attendance improves. Glennon said if the goal were actually to address chronic absenteeism, the approach would involve enforcing truancy laws, which once were taken seriously and are now essentially unenforced, and holding both schools and parents accountable. Instead, the accountability mechanism was simply removed.
He said the absenteeism situation connects directly to the school closure question, where Mayor Brandon Johnson has announced no closures despite a CPS system in which some schools operate at fifteen percent of capacity. When per-pupil funding follows attendance formulas that have been manipulated to obscure real enrollment figures, there is no fiscal pressure to rationalize the footprint. The result is a per-student cost at CPS of well over thirty thousand dollars annually that produces roughly one-quarter of students reading at grade level and a similarly dismal math performance, with outcomes even worse for minority students.
On Governor Pritzker’s public criticism of Mayor Johnson for having no plan to keep the Bears in Chicago and for showing up late to Springfield when he wants the legislature to do something for the city, Glennon said Pritzker is factually correct on both counts. He said lobbyists he knows describe Chicago’s Springfield operation as laughable, with the city having no effective strategy for working the legislature on virtually any issue. He also noted the likely political subtext, which is that Pritzker is positioning himself to avoid being blamed if the Bears ultimately choose to relocate to Hammond, Indiana, by establishing a public record of having criticized Johnson’s inaction. Glennon said while that political calculation may be understandable, Pritzker should not escape accountability for his own role in the political establishment that made Johnson’s election possible, including his indirect assistance to Johnson’s campaign through attacks on Paul Vallas during the race.