Have you looked at your tax bill lately?
The answer might be yes, if you’ve paid the second installment of property taxes in DuPage County recently. Or it might be no, if your taxes are rolled into your monthly mortgage payments.
Tax bills contain a lot of information. On the right hand side is a column listing the fair cash value of your home, its assessed and equalized value and ultimately its net taxable value, to which the total tax rate is applied.
That total tax rate is the sum of individual tax rates for the 13 taxing districts listed on the left side of the bill. (There’s actually more than 13 lines, as nine of the districts have separate rates for their pension funds.)
Those 13 taxing districts are the subject of a new series, Taxing Taxes, that The Hinsdalean is launching today on Page 5.
The process by which property tax rates and bills are calculated is a complicated one, so here is the Cliffs Notes version. (See our tax levy stories in November for a more detailed explanation.)
The assessor’s office determines the equalized assessed value of a home by applying a state multiplier to its market value and then subtracting exemptions (for seniors, primary residences and others) to determine the net taxable value.
Taxing districts file a tax levy with the county requesting a certain amount of property taxes. County officials determine if the amount meets the stipulations of the tax cap, adds in an amount for new growth and divides that number by the tax base (total equalized assessed value in the taxing district) to determine a tax rate.
The net taxable value times the total tax rate equals a resident’s tax bill for the year.
Some of the taxing districts on the bill are familiar to residents, like the Hinsdale Public Library, Community Consolidated Elementary District 181, Hinsdale High School District 86 and the Village of Hinsdale, which is featured in our first story in the series on Page 5.
Others — like the DuPage Airport Authority or the DuPage Health Department or the Downers Grove Township Highway Department (listed as Downers Gr Twp Rd on the bill) — might be less familiar.
That’s where we come in. We will devote a full page each month over the next year or so to explaining what each of these government agencies does, how much they spend each year and how much of the total tax bill they represent. We’ll let residents know who is in charge (elected and appointed) and where to find even more information. We’ll also provide more details about the various pensions funds in the state and how they operate.
Every $5 million in real estate in this town — whether that’s a single house or two or three on a block — generates almost $90,000 in property taxes each year. So these 13 taxing districts — most of which have boundaries well beyond Hinsdale’s — are in control of significant resources.
Join us over the next 13 months to learn just how those resources are spent.
