By day, Joseph Berrios is the longest-serving member of the three-man board that holds the power to cut the property tax bill for any parcel in Cook County.
By night, Mr. Berrios is a master fund-raiser, bringing in about $3 million in political contributions over the last decade from the same lawyers who ask him and the board to give tax breaks to their clients.
The amount of contributions from property tax lawyers to Mr. Berrios’s campaign committees was uncovered by the Chicago News Cooperative in a comprehensive review of campaign finance reports and Board of Review decisions.
Donations from property tax appeal lawyers account for 64 percent of the money raised over the past decade by Mr. Berrios, who also is chairman of the county’s Democratic Party.
The lawyer-fueled contributions are providing a big fund-raising edge for Mr. Berrios as he seeks the Democratic nomination for the higher office of county assessor in Tuesday’s primary.
Roughly one-third of Mr. Berrios’s campaign money comes from 15 law firms that have gained the most for their clients from the property tax appeal panel. Together, those top firms have contributed almost $1 million to six political committees controlled by Mr. Berrios and to his daughter, State Representative Maria Antonia Berrios, Democrat of Chicago.
Government watchdog groups say the close ties between the commissioner and the lawyers who argue cases before the board is alarming.
“It’s very hard to have the appearance that there is no conflict of interest when your primary funders are always from a small industry that has the most at stake in your decisions,” said Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.
In an interview this week, Mr. Berrios said the board did not show favoritism.
“No one gets a reduction just because they contribute money,” he said. “No one has to contribute a dime.”
One of Mr. Berrios’s two opponents in Tuesday’s primary, Raymond A. Figueroa, a former alderman and retired Cook County circuit judge, said he advocated prohibiting donations from property tax lawyers to the assessor or appeals board commissioners.
Mr. Figueroa accused Mr. Berrios of taking part in a “pay-to-play” system. “No wonder these lawyers like him,” he said. “They love him, in fact. Their clients benefit from Mr. Berrios’s golden touch.”
Thanks largely to property tax lawyers, Mr. Berrios has raised more in this campaign than two of the four Democratic candidates for county board president. In one day alone, on Jan. 8, the tax appeal bar chipped in a total of more than $33,000 for Mr. Berrios.
Mr. Berrios said in the interview this week that he believed that the board’s decisions were fair and that he hoped to “make the assessor’s office work for the taxpayers.”
Mr. Berrios is not the only local elected official who gets large sums of campaign money from people who stand to gain from his official decisions. Still, the analysis of records revealed that he relies on political financing from property tax lawyers to a far greater extent than James M. Houlihan, the sitting assessor, and the other two Board of Review commissioners.
Mr. Houlihan, who is stepping down after 12 years in office, has raised about as much money over all as Mr. Berrios, but donations from lawyers who handle appeals to his office make up only about one-quarter of Mr. Houlihan’s campaign money.
When he first ran for assessor, Mr. Houlihan sought money from former clients and others whom he had met as a lobbyist because he wanted to avoid relying heavily on property tax lawyers for his re-election campaigns, he said this week.
“I didn’t want the office to have the tone that, unless you contribute to me, you don’t have access,” Mr. Houlihan said.
While largesse from tax lawyers increased Mr. Berrios’s campaign accounts, his political profile also expanded three years ago when he became chairman of the local Democratic organization. After growing up in the Cabrini Green housing project, he graduated from Lane Tech High School and received an accounting degree. He entered politics working under his precinct captain, and was once an employee of the property tax appeal board before being elected commissioner in 1988.
The assessor’s office, where Mr. Berrios wants to work next, sets the tax bill for every parcel in the county, and it is the first avenue of appeal for property owners who feel they are not being taxed fairly. Every year, however, more than 200,000 taxpayers seek further relief from the Board of Review, and many of them hire lawyers to argue on their behalf.
Read the original article from the Chicago News Cooperative.