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NewsClass action lawsuit settlement saves District 217 half-million dollarsBy James Pluta A long-running class-action court battle between dozens of school and park districts in a multi-county region and ComEd over the utility’s appeals of right-of-way assessments has been settled. The Dec. 7 out-of-court settlement, which freezes all of the electrical utility’s right-of-way assessments — the tax value of various undevelopable strips of land in almost every community in every county in its service area — at $21,500 per acre and withdraws all of its refunds, will result in a financial gain to most, if not all, taxing bodies who were party to the suit. For example, Argo Community High School District 217 stands to save more than $500,000, according to Superintendent Kevin O’Mara, who added the district serving Argo-Summit, Bedford Park, Justice and parts of Bridgeview, Willow Springs and Hickory Hills will be reimbursed with interest. The tax implications to special districts such as the Hodgkins Park District, meanwhile, may be less, but will also be felt, said its executive director, Ronald Kubicki. Some of the rights-of-way are tiny, such as the sliver of property along the eastern edge of Argo High School’s baseball fields in Summit, where ComEd owns a five-foot-wide ditch or swale that runs about 300 feet long in a north-south direction outside its fence line and also a brushy area along the railroad freight line tracks between Harlem Avenue and Archer Road. There are three ways to object to tax assessments in Cook County: through a tax objection complaint, a so-called “certificate of error” filing or through the state’s Property Tax Appeals Board. In this case, ComEd had been seeking reductions in all of its right-of-way assessments, which would have resulted in the utility essentially seeking refunds from all affected taxing districts that benefit from their property holdings — which are voluminous. ComEd claimed their properties were overvalued and those that joined in the suit disagreed. “That’s huge,” said O’Mara, the first local taxing body representative to publicly announce the settlement news last week. “We saved district taxpayers $528,530 — money we would otherwise would have to give up ... That’s 10 teachers!” That’s no drop in the bucket, especially with a district that boasts an estimated $30 million annual budget. If the districts didn’t win, the county immediately would have withheld that amount of money from the annual property tax levy amount. The settlement represented the end to a 3-1/2-year process for literally hundreds of school and special districts in the northern Illinois counties of Cook, Kane, Will, McHenry and Lake — including some two-thirds of the school districts across the state. Under the terms of the settlement, brokered in part by attorney Area’s Dallianes on behalf of the school districts, ComEd is barred from filing tax objections again until 2015. “They got the freeze,” O’Mara summed up, “(and) we got the objection removed.” |
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