New Cook County website to make it easier to get property tax info

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Updated: February 20, 2012 2:13PM

For property owners in Cook County, trying to pay a tax bill online, appealing the bill or even tracking down information about money-saving exemptions means hopping between a handful of Cook County government websites and, very often, making a few phone calls in between.

But a new Internet portal, CookCountyPropertyInfo.com, is expected to clear up the tangled web and provide home and commercial property owners a single destination to get five years worth of information on everything from tax bills, appeals and exemptions to the history of the property’s ownership and even whether it sits in a tax-increment financing district.

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, whose office is charged with printing and delivering tax bills to owners of 1.7 million parcels of property, came up with the idea of offering a more-user friendly website.

“What we’re trying to do is make it easy, so you aren’t chasing paper between offices and floors and so that you don’t have to go to the county building or to the satellite offices to get this information, which is now in five or six different places,” Pappas said at a Thursday news conference with County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and other elected officials.

Preckwinkle said the site will “kind of stop paper government.”

CookCountyPropertyInfo.com goes live April 1.

Lisa Donovan