The McLean County supervisor of assessments will start publishing assessed value changes and township equalization factors for the 2025 assessment year — some of the ingredients that determine what you property owners in property taxes. Taxpayers in certain townships will receive notices by mail starting next week, and the remainder of the county will be rolled out in phases over the coming weeks.
The county’s median increase in assessed value is expected to remain higher than normal as the upward trend of housing demand increases. It could be as high as 11%.
“In Illinois, we value properties on a three-year lookback," said Tim Jorczak, the county's chief county assessment officer. "So, what we’re doing is we’re taking data from the last three years, and we’re using that sales information to bring properties up to their current market value. ... We know, with a good amount of specificity, what your increases are going to be. This year the typical increase in McLean County is going to be around 8.5%.”
When interviewed last year, Jorczak said rates would rise between 8% and 12%. He confirmed the figure solidified at 10.8%.
Last year, he expected the county’s overall equalized assessed value [EAV], or property tax base, at $6.2 billion. This year he projects $6.6 billion.
Public information sessions
Jorczak said his office will once again hold public information sessions across the county, starting Aug. 28. It is an attempt to help clear up confusion over the difference between a property’s assessed value or market value and how that relates to how much a taxpayer pays in property taxes. He said the importance of the sessions cannot be overstated.
“They think this process is very abstract in a backroom somewhere, something like that. We love the opportunity to get out there and explain to taxpayers the way this process works,” he said. “We love answering their questions, being able to take some of the cloudiness out of it.”
He said taxpayers are provided with insight to the process and leave the event with a better understanding.
“They may not ultimately agree with the value that we’ve assigned to their property, but they understand how we arrived at it, and they understand there’s an overall process to it,” Jorczak said.
Jorczak's office sends out mailers to every property in McLean County to notify of changes to property values and provide contact information to learn more about the process. Jorczak said the county has moved to a single bi-fold mailer with the same information to reduce costs.
“If we just issue some mass equalization number across your property, we’re not actually required by law to send information in the mail,” he said. “It’s something we have done traditionally in McLean County because we think it’s important that taxpayers get something tangible they can hold and can look at and say, ‘Hey, you know, this is exactly what’s going on with our property,’ but at the same time that’s a very large cost.”
Jorczak said with 69,000 properties in McLean County, it adds up to be a lot of mail, so the new mailers are the way to continue outreach while keeping costs low for the county.
Assessments and taxes
Jorczak said the process of property assessment and how it relates to taxes is the biggest area of confusion for taxpayers.
“The property’s tax rate is ultimately based off of the local spending decisions that are made by your units of government, so the schools, the cities, the towns, the counties. All of those units they generate what’s called a levy, and that’s how much money they’re going to collect from the property tax,” he said.
Once the levy has been decided, it is converted into the property tax rate. The rate is based on the amount of the assessed value in the area of those units of government.
“That assessment is then generated by the township offices who develop the market value for your property,” said Jorczak. “Then we at the county level apply some equalization to make sure everybody is being assessed at the same level, and then that is what your taxes is based off of.”
Jorczak said each of the county’s 31 townships has an individual responsible for establishing the market value of a property using mass appraisal. He said it is the same process as real estate companies like Zillow.
“Those values are then sent to my office at the county level, and what we do is we make sure all properties in the county are being assessed to the same level. So, we all want properties to be at 33.3% of their fair cash value,” he said.
If residents disagree with their properties assessed value, they can submit a complaint to the county Board of Review.
“The last couple years with the way the market factors have been trending, we have seen a slight uptick in the number of complaints we’ve gotten, nothing tremendous,” Jorczak said. “I’d say we probably get about 1,000 complaints a year across McLean County, and that’s all classes of property … out of 69,000 properties.”
The public information sessions are across the county on:
- Aug. 28, McLean: Mount Hope-Funks Grove Parks District Building, 107 North West Street, 6 p.m.
- Sept. 4, LeRoy: Living Well United Center, 209 West Washington Street, 6 p.m.
- Sept. 8, Lexington: Lexington Community Center, 207 West Main Street, 6 p.m.
- Sept. 16, Normal: Normal Community Activity Center, 1110 Douglas Street, 6 p.m.
