Don't be led astray on the Lake County Assessor Bill SB2544

When you keep hearing your local politician say over and over again that “the Assessor must be accountable to the people and not be "politically connected"; please, keep these 5 things in mind:

1. In Yingling's public comments on SB2455, he has said that converting the tax assessor from a professional merit-based appointment into a political nominee means this person won't be "politically connected". Does that make sense to you? Apparently it does in Springfield.

2. If Yingling is successful in passing his bill, our Lake County Tax Assessor will now have to become more efficient at playing politics to win elections than improving his or her professional skills as an assessor. How does that serve the best interest of the community and the tax payers?

3. What happens when an elected assessor subsequently has a problem with performance, ethics or corruption - like there was recently in Chicago? Yingling believes you can wait 2-4 years to vote them out. Under the current merit-based system, the appointment is "at will" and the termination can happen immediately. Which way seems more accountable to the tax payers to you?

4. How does another elected politician lower our taxes, anyway? We have hundreds of them already in Springfield and nothing changes.

5. Most of the counties in Illinois use a merit-based system for their Assessor and SB2455 only impacts Lake County. If it is good enough for us, why didn't Yingling include the rest of the state in his bill?

It is, after all, election season, and politicians are looking for easy political wins for their campaigns. And around here, your local politician especially needs something that looks like they are fighting the good fight on property taxes. So, when your representative is pushing a bill that politicizes a merit-based occupation so it won't be "politically connected", that may sound normal to a creature of Springfield. Here on Main Street, we call that "trying to pull a fast one".