David Burns, Chief of Staff for the Cook County Treasurer's Office, presented the office's $19.1 million 2026 budget to the Finance Committee. The presentation covered revenue variances, the ongoing Tyler integrated property tax system implementation, property tax reform legislation, and the status of upcoming tax sales. Commissioners asked questions about contractual services, personnel restructuring, scavenger sales, disbursement barriers, and collaboration between county offices.
David Burns. Representative Dave. Good morning. David Burns, Chief of Staff, Cookhand Treasurer's Office. Um, here in the place of CookAn Treasurer Maria Pappas. Uh, thank you to the finance committee and Chairman Daly for having me here. Our 2026 budget is $19.1 million dollars, and our budget is is relatively simple. The overwhelming majority of the Treasurer's budget, $18.4 million comes from our automation account, not general county revenue. Per accounty ordinance passed years ago by this board, the fees collected from commercial and bulk payer pay bulk payers fund the office. We don't have any anticipated budget or spending concerns for the remainder of this fiscal year. We currently have nine open positions. One is on the corporate fund, eight are on the special purpose fund, and I'll speak to some of our special purpose needs here in a couple minutes. As far as some of our budget updates, our our revenue from late payers is trending higher. The budget revenue estimate is $35 million, and the revenue that we've collected through June was $33.8 million. The reason for that is that roughly uh $14 million in revenue was collected between December of 2025 at the start of the fiscal year through April of 2026 because of the second installment due date for last year, which fell into fiscal year 25. So the year-end revenue projection will is expected to come in higher at 47.4 million dollars. So that's a uh a difference on the plus side of 12.4 million dollars. And we do not expect to spend over our budget on the corporate fund. As far as some of the highlights for 2026, what the office has has been doing, we continue to work on the full implementation of the uh Tyler integrated property tax system. There's been a great deal of attention on this project. We remain focused to see the implementation of a defect free system, and our our staff is is aligned accordingly with um with the the respective stakeholders in the county. Uh as I've discussed and and I think uh Treasure Pappas has discussed and other folks in our office numerous occasions. The Treasurer's Office is at the tail end of the property tax cycle. In order to establish a property tax due date, we rely on data and processes from other offices. The assessments and exemptions come from the assessor's office, appeals are heard and finalized by the Board of Review. The State Department of Revenue calculates the equalization factor, tax extension tax rates are calculated to determine by the county clerk's office based based on the levies, revenue uh sought by taxing districts spread throughout the city of Chicago and suburban Cook County. Only after those tasks are completed that we will get a tax bill file and from the Tyler system and review that. Once we go through our comprehensive testing and determine it is generally free of defects, we pass it to the vendor to print fold and mail the property tax bills. We continue to see uh a number of defects within the Tyler system. When the defect does arise, we log that defect, attach relevant screenshots and evidence to um the supporting documentation and turn it over to the vendor to fix. While we have been successful in greatly increasing the number of refunds to taxpayers, there are certain refund processes that are still impacted by by defense by defects. Additionally, our distribution process remained remains uh impacted by some defects as well. Hopefully, the distribution detail data sought by taxing districts can be added to the taxing agency extra net in the next few days. We are currently loading a file into our development site to test, and then we'll have it released for taxing districts to see the detail of their distributions, which is something that they have asked this board for as well. So that should be done today, tomorrow, by the middle of next week. From an IT stand uh staff standpoint, we continue to add several data experts. And the reason is is threefold. One, we do have some upcoming um retirements over the next few years. We want to bring folks on board so that we can enable proper knowledge transfer of the those tasks and and and institutional knowledge. Additional help has been needed to analyze and diagnose ongoing data challenges with the system. And then the third reason is once we have stability in the integrated property tax system, uh, we're gonna turn back our our focus to AI implementation and utilization. On July 10th, the governor signed into law of the historic property tax reforms uh sought by the treasurer's office in the county. The new law creates that tax deed auction system and it phases out private tax buying in Cook County. The credit goes to Justin Kervin and Chinique Ross from our office for for pushing those those reforms and spending countless hours in in Springfield trying to get the ball across the line there. Our annual property tax sale is postponed for 2023. The 2023 annual tax sale was postponed twice by Springfield. It will occur in December of this year. The reason for those delays was predicated on those tax sale reforms being passed by by Springfield. That's the current current state of the treasurer's office. And I chairman, I'll be happy to entertain any questions.