Cook County Has Indirectly Helped Donald Trump Save $800K
By Mae Rice in News on Jun 20, 2016 7:24PM
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Today in ugh: Cook County didn't just vote for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—our county also helped fund his candidacy—albeit indirectly. An "unwritten" Cook County policy gave Trump a roughly $800,000 discount on property taxes for a long-vacant penthouse in Trump Tower, the Better Government Association reports.
The penthouse unit in question takes up the entire 89th floor of Chicago's Trump Tower, and was initially valued at $11 million before it sold to Vistex CEO Sanjay Shah in 2014 for even more than that ($17 million!). Before the unit sold, however, it stood vacant for five years—and during that time, the property taxes Trump paid on it were discounted 90 percent, due to Cook County's interpretation of a state statute. An official in the Cook County Assessor's office told the BGA that Cook County's take on the statute incentivized real estate developers to build in Chicago, and had been used to benefit many developers besides Trump.
Other counties in Illinois—including DuPage, Will, Lake, McHenry and Kane—don't offer the same discount, though they're governed by the same state statute.
Trump never lived in the penthouse, and saving $800,000 on property taxes may not even matter much in the context of his overall wealth. But it's a bummer that Cook County, in its effort to entice developers, inadvertently propped up a presidential campaign based on racism and dick-measuring—however slightly—especially at a time when state and local budgets are suffering.
We miss the halcyon days when Donald Trump was just an orange private citizen, and the biggest issue with Chicago's Trump Tower was that Mayor Rahm Emanuel thought (correctly) that its sign was ugly.
Read the full BGA story here.