Incumbent CRE favorite wins rugged Board of Review race

Incumbent Larry Rogers Jr. won a hotly contested race to keep his seat on the market-moving Cook County property tax agency the Board of Review, according to Tuesday’s preliminary election results and an interview in which Rogers said his opponent called him to concede.

Rogers, the candidate favored by Chicago’s commercial real estate industry as well as property tax appeal lawyers whose cases involving big landlords he oversees, garnered 61 percent of the vote with all precincts in the board’s southern Third District reporting. Challenger Larecia Tucker had 39 percent, and she called Rogers around 9 p.m. to concede, the incumbent told Crain’s.

Each candidate lobbed ethics accusations against the other during the race, as Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi has poured cash into organizations supporting Tucker, who’s the biggest challenger Rogers has faced since taking his seat on the board in 2004. Rogers, meanwhile, has taken heat for raking in donations from property tax appeals lawyers, whose arguments he’s in charge of hearing and deciding.

“While it was an election for me, more importantly it was a victory for the citizens of Cook County whose ability to appeal Fritz Kaegi’s over-assessments was threatened by his efforts to take over the agency,” Rogers told Crain’s.

Kaegi’s ethics were also criticized by Rogers for throwing the weight of the assessor’s office into the race, since the Board of Review is in charge of determining whether the assessments set by Kaegi for property tax purposes are accurate, or should be reduced to provide taxpayers relief from overcharged property tax bills.

Commercial real estate players have grown disgruntled with Kaegi, who first won election in 2018 with a campaign focused on raising assessments of commercial properties he felt were artificially undervalued by former assessor Joseph Berrios.

But Kaegi has blamed the Board of Review in part for thwarting that objective, pointing to large reductions in assessments granted by the agency. Rogers has been Kaegi’s biggest critic on the board.

A surge in residential real estate values during the pandemic, as well as the strains on the office market caused by the health crisis, and rising interest rates over the last two years have also impeded Kaegi, who has had to account for the market factors in his valuations.

Bigtime landlords have expressed fear and uncertainty of a Board of Review without Rogers, as a Tucker win, following the 2022 election of Samantha Steele, would have put two commissioners on the board who are viewed as more closely aligned with Kaegi on property tax disputes for major commercial buildings.

Former Chicago alderman for the 12th Ward, George Cardenas, holds the other seat, after also winning a 2022 election, meaning a win for Tucker would have left three first-term commissioners on the board.

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