The Chicago Board of Education is slated Wednesday to vote on paying Trump Tower condominium owners about a quarter-million dollars after negotiating a property tax appeal from 2015.
The proposed settlement of $221,802, plus interest, follows a pending agreement between the education board and condo owners in the residential portion of Trump International Hotel & Tower at 401 N. Wabash Ave., Board of Education attorney Ares Dalianis told the Tribune.
Despite the taxing body having to pay back the condo owners, Dalianis said the school board sees the settlement as “favorable” because the residents in Trump Tower were seeking far more when they appealed. He said the negotiations allowed Chicago Public Schools to avoid paying more than $1 million to the condo owners.
Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago on March 29, 2021. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)
“This is a very favorable settlement for the Board of Ed,” Dalianis said. “(The board is) preserving a huge amount of the property taxes that are at risk in this appeal.”
However, the board on Wednesday is also scheduled to vote on paying $2 million to another group of Chicago luxury high-rise condo owners, this one along North DuSable Lake Shore Drive in the Gold Coast. In both cases, the money will be taken out of the school board’s tax revenues from 2021 or later.
Sign up for The Spin to get the top stories in politics delivered to your inbox weekday afternoons.
In the Trump Tower case, the condo owners collectively appealed their 2015 Cook County property tax assessments to the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board. They combined their 484 condo units and 676 parking spaces into one entity when arguing the county had assessed them too high.
Though Trump Tower, developed by former President Donald Trump, also contains a hotel and offices, those properties were not related to the case.
Represented by attorney Patrick McNerney, who has also done legal work for Trump, the condo owners argued their $647 million combined assessment was only worth $500 million. McNerney did not respond to requests for comment Monday.
If the condo owners had succeeded in that argument, the Chicago Board of Education would owe the condo owners $1,351,000, Dalianis said. Typically, Chicago’s public school system gets about half of the city’s property tax revenue, meaning it stands the most to lose if property owners nab a big refund.
The Chicago Board of Education intervened in the Trump Tower cases and managed to negotiate a pending settlement that only grants the condo owners $221,802 to split among all of them, Dalianis said.
Other taxing bodies, such as the city of Chicago and Cook County, will also have to pay some refund that would be equivalent to the portion of the settlement the Board of Education agreed on, Dalianis said.
Several high-profile Chicagoans lived in Trump Tower at the time of the 2015 appeal or owned property there and were parties to the cases, including Blackhawks right wing Patrick Kane, former Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose, former United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek and Exelon CEO Christopher Crane, according to public records.
Condos in the building can sell for millions of dollars, and tech CEO Sanjay Shah in September listed the Trump Tower penthouse for $30 million. Shah bought the space in 2014 for $17 million. His 2020 tax bill was more than $250,000.
The downtown high-rise bearing the Trump name has been the subject of other high-profile tax appeal cases, such as when a government watchdog reported that the former executive director of Illinois PTAB deleted computer files related to whether Trump was due a $1 million property tax refund.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
ayin@chicagotribune.com
tswartz@Tribpub.com
Copyright © 2022, Chicago Tribune