Maria Pappas is the only candidate for mayor who has proven she cares for taxpayers

The list of Chicago mayoral contenders continues to grow, but besides big warchests and high profile media, only one has actually demonstrated policies and actions that show concern for taxpayers

By Ray Hanania

I’ve known Maria Pappas since the 1980s, when she was with the Cook County Board. She’s one of the hardest-working officials, but most importantly, she thinks out of the box when it comes to overcoming insurmountable challenges.

If Chicago had another name, it would be “insurmountable challenges.”

Ever since Richard M. Daley retired, Chicago has been floundering. Daley succeeded because when elected in 1989, he addressed and resolved the one major challenge everyone wanted resolved, bringing down the volume on racial tensions and refocusing on strengthening the city.

Daley brought down racial tensions – though they will never go away. And he tried to address the toughest challenge, addressing the factors driving up taxes and confronting crime.

His successors, Mayors Rahm Emanuel, Lori Lightfoot, and Brandon Johnson, all did the opposite, failing to reverse Chicago’s downward slide. Emanuel and Lightfoot even contributed to the city’s and region’s problems with their racist approach to minority communities, racist policies that they hope you will forget.

As a former Chicago City Hall reporter with a desk at the City Hall Press Room for 16 years (1976-92) and a political reporter for 33 more since, I saw how city government officials maneuvered around the big challenges and how they almost always chose raising taxes as the only answer.

Ray Hanania at his desk at Chicago City Hall in 1983.

Chicago’s population has fallen because people have lost confidence in the ability of Chicago’s mayors to address these challenges.

Crime isn’t as bad as it has been, but that’s just what I call “political relativity” – we’ve been conditioned to accept “when things get better,” but never expect the challenges to be resolved.

“Better” versus “Resolved” is a big gap in achievement and doesn’t even come close to resolving problems. In fact, using that standard method to address problems actually makes things worse.

I believe Maria Pappas is the person who changed all that. If Chicago can reverse course and improve, the rest of the region will change course and improve, too.

Pappas, now the Cook County Treasurer, thinks out of the box. She’s not afraid to say what needs to be said. She doesn’t tiptoe around the challenges with vague statements, and she doesn’t care how things make her look.

She is the one politician who only cares about how things impact taxpayers, and her records have shown she is not afraid to push back on rising property taxes and fees.

There is one hard rule about government. Once a politician or government imposes a tax increase, they may call it temporary, but they never reduce it, return it or eliminate it.

It’s the old Chicago Skyway principle. When building the Skyway, they raised taxes and imposed high tolls, and promised it would be temporary. But once the government takes a dollar out of your pocket, it never returns it. They just keep taking.

Pappas did the exact opposite.

As Cook County Treasurer, Pappas reversed that political trend, launching the Cook County Treasurer’s automatic refund program in July 2018. Under the program, Pappas has returned about $143.2 million to over 165,114 property owners without requiring an application.

Most governments and politicians won’t tell you that you overpaid, because they don’t want to return your taxes, ever. It goes against the traditional political grain. Pappas is different.

In fact, since 2009, Pappas has refunded and prevented nearly $544 million in property tax overpayments.

Currently, there is about $122 million in potential refunds still unclaimed by property owners, going back 20 years.

Her “Stop Taxpayer Over-Payment System” (STOPS), which automatically stops and returns a second payment on a property, has prevented the misdirection of over $306.2 million in duplicate payments since it began in 2009.

She didn’t start recently returning and refunding tax overpayments to homeowners and businesses because she wanted to run for mayor. She started in 2020, not discouraged by the COVID Pandemic, to begin the process to refund overpayments when she saw it was becoming a major problem for taxpayers.

She didn’t stand behind press releases to promote it, she actually went out there and helped explain to taxpayers who overpaid how to get their money back and she reached out to all of the various ethnic communities in addition to the mainstream communities.

Cook CountyTreasurer Maria Pappas at the work desk at a community event to help taxpayers apply to recover tax overpayments in early 2021, one of hundreds she organized around the county..

Check it out at CookCountyTreasurer.com.

You can hear the politicians screaming that Pappas is setting the wrong example. Their motto has always been “Once You Get the Dollar, Never Return It.” Keep it and increase it. If you start returning tax payments, the taxpayers might wake up and expect more.

Ask any of the politicians being touted as mayoral candidates how much in property taxes they have returned to taxpayers?

The one with the most money is Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who also has more baggage than a shuttered O’Hare Airport during a winter snowstorm.

Other candidates include Comptroller Susana Mendoza, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, and City Clerk Anna Valencia.

The “other” list also includes former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who can’t decide what he wants because it is all about him, and former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who dragged the city down the dirty alley too many times.

How Emanuel can even consider running again for Mayor, given his tax policies, is unbelievable, although he is hoping he can “upgrade” his candidacy to run for President, depending on how his campaign to redesign his image goes.

As Mayor, Emanuel imposed a significant increase in Chicago taxes, which included a $588 million property tax hike phased in over four years, along with a garbage collection fee, e-cigarette tax, and increased fees on taxis and ridesharing services. The total new taxes and fees under his administration were projected to be over $700 million per year when fully implemented.

As Mayor, Lightfoot imposed a $94 million property tax increase in the 2021 budget and a $76.5 million property tax increase in the 2022 budget. Additionally, a 3-cent per gallon gas tax hike was implemented in 2021, and a policy to tie property tax increases to inflation was put in place, leading to a significantly larger tax hike in 2023.

None of them can give you a number on how much they have cut back in taxes, because none of them have returned any taxes.

Instead of cutting back on taxes, they either raise them or say nothing when they get raised. Their silence in the face of the State’s $1.5 billion hike on taxpayers was deafening.

Costs have more than doubled because of this lack of leadership. Illinois is the biggest driver of tax hikes. What have any of them done to stop them? Nothing.

As a result, your income is only 75 percent of what it used to be a few years ago.

They call it “inflation,” but they should call it “poor government leadership.” Inflation is an adjective. Poor government leadership erodes your income strength.

Pappas can change the economic imbalance in our lives. If you can improve the economy, everything else starts to fall in line, including reducing crime.

The Chicago mayoral election isn’t until Feb. 23, 2027. It seems like a long way off, but it is not. That’s why the candidates have already started to “pre-campaign,” telling everyone they are running or thinking about it.

My choice for Chicago mayor is Maria Pappas. And if you’re a taxpayer who would like to see politicians stop taking more and more taxes from you and instead manage their governments better in the same way you struggle to manage your home and business budgets, she should be your choice for Chicago Mayor, too.