This much everyone agrees on: Brookfield property owners living in Special Service Area 4 opened their tax bills three weeks ago and noticed that their SSA levy for 2005 had roughly doubled. What everyone doesn’t appear to agree on is how exactly the snafu happened and who’s responsible for it.
While the village and Cook County continue to sort out that issue, earlier this week residents in SSA #4 should have received a letter from the village outlining the problem and promising a timely refund for the mistake. The letters were sent out Friday.
According to Brookfield Assistant Manager Keith Sbiral, the village has received a list of all taxpayers in SSA #4 from the county and that refund checks should be ready to be sent to residents by mid-September.
“The key for us is that for most residents this is a significant amount of money,” Sbiral said. “This can’t wait, and it’s been priority No. 1 since the tax bills came out.”
Sbiral said that Village Hall started receiving calls from residents just days after tax bills arrived at homes in early August. It was soon apparent that the mistake was limited to SSA #4, which was established in 1993 to issue bonds to pay for street and storm sewer construction.
One of six SSAs on the south end of Brookfield, SSA #4 is the largest with some 450 separate taxable parcels. The SSA is in the southwest corner of the village and is irregular in shape. Its borders are roughly Blanchan Avenue on the west and Arthur Avenue on the east, 47th Street on the south and Congress Park Avenue on the north, although there are two “islands”-one on Deyo Avenue and one on Madison Avenue-within the SSA that were never part of it.
Residents in the SSA have been paying back the bonds through a line item on their tax bills, except in 2004, when the village board voted to assume the debt payment. The bonds for SSA #4 will be paid off in 2013.
When the tax bills arrived a few weeks ago, property owners experienced a bit of sticker shock. It appeared that their SSA payment had doubled. In addition to a flurry of phone calls to village hall, the rumor mill kicked into gear. Some speculated that the administration was trying to pin the blame on the village’s former finance director.
Others advanced the theory that SSA residents were being double taxed by the village in order to recoup the money it paid out in 2004, when the board voted to assume the debt. Still others felt that the current administration was engaging in some sort of political retribution against residents on the south side of town.
According to Sbiral, what happened was a bit more pedestrian. In 2004, the village refinanced the 1993 bonds in order to take advantage of lower interest rates. But somehow-and the blame may be shared between the village and county-the county never abated the levy from the 1993 bonds.
As a result, when the 2005 taxes were levied, they were levied twice. The county not only levied the $163,673 tax amount for the 2004 refinancing, they also levied the tax amount for the original 1993 bond issue-another $166,550.
According to Bill Vaselopulos, manager of tax extension for the Cook County Clerk, the village failed to provide the county with the proper documents abating the levy on the 1993 bond issue.
“They didn’t give us the right documents to carry out their wishes,” Vaselopulos said.
But Village Atty. Richard Ramello insists that the village did, in fact, send the county the proper paperwork in the form of a Certificate of Tax Reduction in August 2005.
“What I’ve seen so far is that the village sent out the levy related to the 2004 bonds,” Ramello said. “Where [the county] picked up the amount for the 1993 bonds I’m not sure.”
Confusing the issue further is that the county levied tax amounts correctly in all of the village’s other SSAs, whose bond issues were also refinanced back in 2004. Whether the village simply overlooked some paperwork regarding SSA #4 or the county missed that paperwork remains an open question.
Vaselopulos said that for now the county’s focus has been on determining the amount of money that needs to be refunded to residents and getting tax information to Brookfield so the Village can make its refunds. It’s likely that the full story behind the snafu will come out during a later meeting between the two groups.
“We discovered this a week ago, and the village and us have been trying to deal with the taxpayers and a refunding program,” Vaselopulos said. “We’ve spent little or no time on who did or didn’t do what. We haven’t had time to do that.”
Trustee Kit Ketchmark, who is the village board’s finance chairman, said that the county declined to reissue tax bills because some pay their taxes immediately while others have their taxes paid through an escrow account.
“They suggested we do it in the spring, but that’s not acceptable,” Ketchmark said. “Seeing as we’re receiving the money, we should be refunding the money.”
Ketchmark also said that property owners who pay through an escrow account should forward the village’s letter explaining the snafu to their mortgage companies so that the companies don’t take out more money in escrow than necessary in the future.
“No doubt this is an inconvenience to the residents,” Sbiral said. “But sometimes these things happen. The village is doing everything on behalf of the residents to resolve this as quickly as possible.”