If you haven’t looked closely at your proposed 2011 property tax, you should. In my case the overall tax increased 15.7 percent for a non-homestead, small cabin in the woods. What is so alarming about this increase is that almost 50 percent of it is in one line item, “Special Taxing District” which was increased 134 percent from 2010 taxes. I called the Cook County Auditor and Treasurer, Braidy Powers and he explained that this Special Taxing District increase is primarily from the North Shore Hospital, which has its own tax levying authority.
I did some checking and found out that up until a few years ago, the law capped the hospital’s tax levy increases at 3 percent. Then the state legislature removed this cap and the hospital’s tax levy slowly rose to $425,000 by 2010 (going up 10 percent from 2009). Now the hospital is proposing a levy of $1.2 million for 2011, which represents a 182 percent increase over 2010.
In an October 2010 article in the Cook County News
Herald,
hospital administrator Kimber Wraalstad stated, “Just to meet the standards the feds are going to require is going to cost us a lot of money.”
She then cited one of President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Initiatives (HRI), electronic medical records, as an example. The implication being that these standards are a big reason for their tax levy increase. What isn’t mentioned is that the medical record standard does not become a requirement until 2014 and is not enforced until 2015. Does this mean that we can also expect huge increases in the hospital’s tax levy for 2012 and beyond.
So much for the government’s promise that the HRI was going to bring down costs or that there would be no tax increases for the middle class.
There is a county meeting open to the public on the overall 2011 proposed property taxes at 6 p.m. on December 14. Thehospital is also having a public meeting on their proposed $1.2 million tax levy at the much more inconvenient date of December 23 at 9:30 a.m.
Jim Peterson
Lutsen
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