Brookfield’s finance director, Doug Cooper, said the village has only received about a quarter of the property tax funds from 2024 it is still owed by Cook County.
“We were missing about $4.5 million’s worth of property taxes, and that funds the majority of our expenditures” for the final months of the year, Cooper told the Landmark.
As of Friday, Jan. 23, Brookfield has received $1.37 million of the $4.5 million total, Cooper said. Nearly half of that was distributed in January, as Brookfield had only received about $700,000 by Dec. 31, according to village documents.
The funds represent the second installment of the 2024 property taxes that were levied last year, Cooper said. The first installment, worth about $4.86 million, was distributed on time in 2025.
Brookfield took out a $1.5 million line of credit in September from the First National Bank of Brookfield due to the county’s delay in distributing the tax funds. After the village used the full credit line through Dec. 1, trustees on Jan. 12 approved extending it by another $1 million, which Cooper said sustained Brookfield until the county could begin disbursing the funding.
“They didn’t even get the tax bills out until November, and they should have gone out back in August, and we would have started receiving the property tax monies in September. That would have funded us through the rest of the year. Well, we never got them,” he said. “Each one of our payrolls is probably about $400,000 to $450,000, so we just needed to make sure we had that covered until the county actually started distributing the funds.”
The initial delay, which is also impacting local school districts, was due to a systems upgrade undertaken by the county to replace a 1970s mainframe computer with more modern technology, Jim Thompson, the director of property assessment and tax policy for the Cook County Office of the President, told the Landmark in December.
Now that the village has started to receive some funds, Cooper said he doubts Brookfield will need to make use of the extended credit line.
“But just in case we do, it’s all there. The entire line of credit, whatever the balance is on there, is going to be due and will be paid off by March 26,” he said.
While the first installment of property taxes is usually due by the first week of March, Cooper noted that the Cook County Treasurer’s website currently does not display a date for the 2025 taxes that are set to be collected this year.
If Cook County fails to distribute any of the remaining money, which Cooper said is unlikely, Brookfield would have to turn to its reserve funds, he said.
“We have about $2 million in reserves that we would have to go to the board and specifically ask them to allow us to tap into those reserves. That would occur over two meetings and then a third meeting for approval,” he said.
In such a situation, he said the village would act ahead of time to ensure there are no interruptions to payroll, vendor checks and other important transactions.
“That’s why we did this back in September. That’s why we started initiating the line of credit. We were trying to get ahead of it back then,” he said.
