Welcome, Lou, the Honorable Lou Paso, the Kirk County Public Administrator.

Hello, Commissioners.

I've got a very uplifting budget story to tell you today.

I'm joined here by our general counsel, Leah Jegobaski, and also our business manager, Amber Gordon.

Just to recap, the probate act sets forth the duties of the public administrator.

The office operates entirely from funds it generates through statutory mandate and not from tax revenue.

Funds are generated from estates of decedents who leave no will or those named as executive are incapable or unavailable or disqualified.

The administration of estates is subject to the oversight and review by the Circuit Court of Cook County probate divisions.

Everything we do has to be approved by a judge.

The PA's office has 15 full-time staff, and we use four outside attorneys to handle our uh administration of the states.

We had a 20 percent reduction in 2016.

I could sure use those two extra investigators because our workflow has increased substantially.

We have done 619 investigations.

Those investigations uh actually uh we go out to to homes of people, uh, we try to uh see what kind of assets they have, we try to secure them.

Uh and that's there's a process involved with that, and we have four investigators that handle that process.

Uh the current budget is a little less than two million dollars right now, but to date, I'm happy to say we've we've gotten over 2.2 million dollars in revenue.

Uh and through the third quarter, we're projecting a $2.3 million revenue return to the county.

This represents 118% of our revenue target in the budget for 26.

Uh, that is a substantial increase.

Uh, and uh I can't put my finger on why, but we have a lot of people that are using our services uh involuntarily because they they pass on and we end up with the estate.

But I'm happy to to say that 20 million dollars has been returned to uh beneficiaries and heirs of the estates.

And one of the rewarding things about this job is that I get to sometimes call individuals uh and tell them that they're getting certain funds.

I wrote a couple of checks for over 200,000 to a couple of beneficiaries.

Uh and many of these people don't know that Uncle Joe or Aunt Betsy died, uh, and they are very pleased to know that somebody is looking after the assets of the estate.

We live in a society where people are disjointed.

We have people living in California, Florida, Connecticut, all over, and sometimes are not really close to some of the uh relatives that they have.

So that is something that uh is a real, real issue.

We also do wrongful wrongful deaths settlements.

We we work with the nursing homes and we've we've uh received three million dollars in additional monies from nursing homes.

Uh these are people who may have not been treated well as as they're under uh under the supervision of the nursing home, and uh we have uh our attorneys have gone in and collected this three million dollars.

The budget target for 2027 is only 171,000 over the budget we have now.

Uh and that's basically due to the SIU collective bargaining agreements, merit-based promotions, a general and continued operating account increase for real estate management, bond premiums, and related fees.

Uh we also manage properties.

We have sold 27 properties uh for a return of seven million dollars to the to the estates.

We also manage properties.

We have 44 properties under manager right now.

And what we have to do with these properties make sure the electrical is working, the plumbing is working, uh, snow is removed, grass is cut, and if we don't do that, we get a nasty letter from the alderman saying, why don't you do this?

So that is something we do.

So that's another facet of what we do, property management.

So in summary, I must I'll tell you that uh the Office of the Public Administrator is a revenue-producing agency, both the state and county.

We operate on a zero-based budgeting concept uh in that our annual revenues far exceeds what the budget appropriation is.

Uh as such, we hope that we we don't have additional additional reductions in FY27, because that would be a real problem with the cur with the current workload we have.

We're currently at 396 estates that are ongoing.

Uh and as I mentioned previously, we have 619 investigations, and that takes a lot of a lot of uh staff time to go through that.

And I I just want to thank the commissioners who have reached out to me during the year who've asked me to uh intercede on maybe their constituents who may have lost a loved one.

They want may want to know where individuals are in this process.

Uh I tried to answer all the questions as best I could.

And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out again.

I appreciate that.

And having said that, I want to thank everybody for the work you do and for the assistance you give in our office, and I'll take any questions you might have.

Oh, thank you for your hard work and your terrorist hand.

As you said, you produced money for the government.

Well, thank you.

Commissioner Long.

Thank you, Chairman.

Public administrator apostle, thank you so much for your work.

Thank you.

Thank you also for uh your documentation.

As I look at really the language which serves as the basis of what your office does, the probate act.

Yes.

It's noted that funds are generated from estates of uh decedents uh who leave no will or those named as an executor who are incapable of serving, unavailable or disqualified.

Yes.

What is the actual process for your office to determine whether one dies uh in test state?

What's the process?

Well, the way it works is that we usually get a call from the uh medical examiner's office.

It's a we have a body, nobody's claimed it.

Uh would you look into this?

And we start the process from there.

We we we go if the individuals in a home or is renting property, we make sure his assets are secured.

Normally the police go in first, take the body out, and then we go in afterwards, and we do an inventory of all the assets of the estate.

We don't do that individually.

We have somebody relative and uh relative or maybe maybe the uh manager of the property goes with us because we don't want to, you know, we don't want to have our investigators go alone because then you get into a situation, uh I had a Rolex watch, it's gone now, I had this and that, it's gone.

We want to make sure that we have other people come with us and we do an inventory.

Do you um does your office get involved in uh a general question of fact determining if in fact, given those facts, an individual died in test state or with a valid will?

Well, that comes later.

Sometimes uh we we assume if we can't find a will, we assume the person died in test state.

However, there might be an attorney who have has done a will, they might have a copy of the will.

They may come later on in the process and seek to remove us and represent the uh individual as testate.

And what percentage of cases roughly that come before your office uh is the ultimate determination that a person did in fact die with the will, without will.

Uh it depends.

I can't give you a percentage on that, but it depends on uh if in fact a will can be found.

Sometimes a will is found, but it's uh it's put aside.

There might be you know scratches on it that they don't want to they they don't want it to be uh you know it's it invalidate with the with the with the with the court.

Uh and that's basically how that works.

And if a determination is reached in your office that an individual dies in test state or that they have a will, and that decision is to be questioned, what would be the next step for an individual?

Well, we'd have to file file in probate court, open an estate.

Uh you know, the six-month period for filing claims after that, where individuals who may have a claim against the against the individual or the estate would file a claim and we'd look at that claim to make sure it's it's proper uh before we approve it.

And then at that point it would be assigned to a judge or thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner Degman.

No question.

Thank you very much for the thank you.

Commissioner Naya.

Um so my question was in regards to what the process looks like after there's a determination, but you just answered it with Commissioner Lari.

Um I I had another question regarding um the fact that the fees and licenses um for the first um uh part of FY2026 doubled what you were expecting, and just wondering if that is the case as well for the remainder of the year, what that looks like, those projections look like for FY27.

We don't know yet because these things uh happen.

So they just fluctuate and we don't really know.

Okay.

I mean, I I uh I open estates all the time.

Sometimes I open five at a time, and sometimes there's no estates to open.

But they they take out a life of their own.

Once they're in court, the judge gets involved, he makes sure everything is done properly.

Uh and there could be motions, there could be beneficiaries suing each other.

We've got cases that have gone the loaning supreme court.

Uh and um, you know, it's something that you don't know what what's going to happen until that you get involved.

Yeah.

Some of these are very complex.

And then just to clarify in question, you mentioned that you had about 300, I think you said 98 estates that you had, and then 619 investigations.

How or when do they correlate?

Like when do you see that uh there because that's a big difference between one or the other.

So I'm just wondering just to clarify what that is.

I'll tell you why.

Uh we will not take any estate that's less than $10,000.

It doesn't make financial sense for the county to spend the money to work on that estate.

So there's a $10,000 threshold.

Aside from that, a lot of times you open these estates and then we we get removed.

There might be an individual comes forward saying, I'd like to, instead of you being the uh administrator, I'd like to be the administrator.

They go over for the judge, whatever judge there is, and they make their case on whether they should be the administrator or not.

Nine times out of ten, when we're involved in an estate for more than 90 days, the judge will not remove us.

They'll keep us.

And we we really uh are a good financial benefit to the individuals because uh you know private law firms charge a lot more money than we do for these management.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the 398 are the ones that you actually are able to follow through.

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

Those are estates you've already opened.

Gotcha.

Uh Chairman, those are my only questions.

Commissioner Chair.

Uh thank you.

Uh thank you for the for the work that you do.

I just have one question, sort of a follow-up from um Clerk Spiropoulos' comments.

She's working on a system where wills will be um uh where there will be a registry essentially.

How will that relate to the services that that you provide?

As far as the uh data processing services, we use a company called CompuTrust.

They're out of California, they had a probate system in place when we adopted us.

We went to the uh county MIS department, and you know, there's so many complexities there that they said if you have a system that works, please use it.

And we've been using that system for 20 years.

It's worked out well.

You're able to keep track of every item that goes through the estates, and uh to make sure that you can put your finger on what you need to do.

So there's not gonna be any kind of connection between the registry of wills of the well, the the clerk's office, if there's a will filed, the clerk's office will will notify us.

Yeah.

All right.

We do a lot of work with the county clerk.

We're very, you know, everything we do really goes through the county clerk.

So well, this would actually be through the clerk of the circuit court.

Yes, yes, yes.

Okay, or the all my questions, thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner McCays who Matt, thank you again.

Oh, the best.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you much.