A bombshell announcement was made at a morning press conference Wednesday, which will have major ramifications for an upcoming election in Chicago.
Oh yeah, and Tom Dart said something, too.
Just as Dart was convening his much-hyped press conference, the independent candidate for the humble office of Cook County Assessor was releasing a flood of new data suggesting that his Democratic opponent has some major conflicts of interest.
Forrest Claypool has long said that Joe Berrios, the Democrat for Assessor, would struggle with conflicts if elected to oversee the county's property taxes. Claypool frequently quotes the Better Government Association calling Berrios "pay-to-play personified."
But on Wednesday, his camp followed the money. It released a detailed analysis of which buildings got major property tax breaks from the Board of Review, on which Berrios currently sits; which lawyers represented those buildings to the Board; and how much those lawyers gave to Berrios's campaign funds.
The results are astonishing.
Claypool's website now featuresa map of the reductions, with Berrios contributions attached. Huffington Post Chicago has drilled deeper into the data, unearthed by Freedom of Information Act requests from Claypool's team.
In 2009, three hundred properties in Cook County received property tax reductions of $2 million or more from the Board of Review. In total, these 300 properties -- mostly located in the Chicago Loop, with some clustered in Schaumburg and near O'Hare -- received $1.37 billion in tax breaks, which were shouldered by the rest of the county's taxpayers.
The 300 properties were represented to the board by 43 different tax law firms. Of those 43 firms, 42 of them donated to at least one of Berrios's five campaign funds. Only one, the law firm of Dennis M. Nolan, got a major tax break for its clients without donating to Berrios.
The average donation from the firms was $45,000; the largest came from Steven B. Pearlman and Associates, to the tune of $190,875.
Crane & Norcross donated over $146,000 to Joe Berrios in 2009, according to the data; Berrios's Board of Review gave Crane's biggest clients $136 million in tax breaks in the same year.
Madigan & Getzendanner clients won over $346 million in breaks last year. The firm only gave $13,750 to Berrios, but it has other ways of reciprocating.
The Madigan in Madigan & Getzendanner is, of course, House Speaker Mike Madigan. This year, the State House he controls finally passed a bill legalizing widely unpopular and dangerously addictive video poker gambling -- Joe Berrios also works as a lobbyist for the gaming industry in Illinois, which will see windfall profits from the new law.
Berrios's campaign couldn't immediately refute any of the data, but that didn't stop Berrios from firing back with a childish insult for Claypool. From the Sun-Times:
In a prepared statement released later Wednesday, Berrios said that he was still sifting through Claypool's data and "disputing it all is difficult at this point."
But Berrios went on to say that "it was immediately evident Claypool has either fabricated information or made several errors that he should address immediately."
"Not only can't he get his facts straight, but I don't think he knows what floor the assessor's office is on."
Claypool has been endorsed by the Sun-Times and the Tribune, the latter of which frequently editorializes against Berrios; the race has put the ordinarily low-profile Assessor's post prominently in the local limelight this election cycle.