Sycamore taxpayers could owe hundreds more to school district on 2024 tax bills

SYCAMORE – Sycamore taxpayers can expect to pay more – some potentially hundreds more, depending on the value of their home – to the school district on their 2024 property tax bills after the Sycamore School District 427 Board approved a $45 million levy this week.

Although board members were told that approving a property tax rate of 5.21% would lower the average taxpayer’s bill by hundreds of dollars, a Shaw Local News Network analysis of the levy shows the opposite.

Under those calculations, a taxpayer whose home was worth $200,000 in 2023 would have paid about $3,780 in property taxes to the school district on their 2023 property tax bill. That same home likely now would be worth about $224,000, and the owner could owe about $400 more on their 2024 tax bill, calculations show.

Sycamore Park District board member Ted Strack attended the district’s public hearing on the tax levy proposal Tuesday. He encouraged the board to not applaud itself for dropping the tax rate because tax bills likely won’t go down.

“The people in Sycamore are taxed out,” Strack said. “They recently got their assessments, and they were out of sight. I know that as a board you don’t control the assessment, you control the tax rate – you have no control of the assessment. What you do have 100% control of is how much you tax the residents. You control that completely.”

Although the property tax rate will drop an estimated 0.45% to 5.21%, the overall 2024 Sycamore school district property tax levy will collect about 4.57% more in property tax revenue than what the district collected in 2023.

Eric Jones, who was elected board vice president of education Tuesday, voted in favor of the property tax levy increase. He said he’s OK with how the district spends the money it collects in the property tax levy.

“I think Sycamore does probably one of the best jobs in the county, if not in upper Illinois, as far as the amount of money we spend to educate a single student,” Jones said. “I think a lot of that is actually born by the very trim administration that we have.”

School district documents presented to the board in October indicate that officials estimate the value of taxable property within the district grew by 12% in 2024. That factor, however, was not included in a table meant to show how much a property owner would pay on their 2024 property taxes to the school district.

Jones said he thinks property tax bills don’t reflect the effort school district officials put into keeping costs down.

“Obviously, being fiscally diligent and conservative is something this board has always strived to do, and I don’t think that seeing your tax bill is a good reflection of the work that’s gone into that from the board’s standpoint,” Jones said.

The levy was approved 6-1, with only Beth Marie Evans voting against it.

Evans said she didn’t think her vote would stop the property tax levy request from being approved, but she felt she needed to vote with her conscience.

“It’s really no fault of the school district, because I know that the state doesn’t give them the funding they need, and I don’t know what’s going on at the state level where we can’t afford to get our high school fixed,” Evans said. “It’s just, I felt it was unfair to the constituents in the district this time. If it would have been the same as last year, I would have [voted to approve it].”

Jones said the district is doing what it needs to do to keep the budget balanced while not receiving as much funding from other sources as he would like.

“It’s unfortunate the state of Illinois does a very poor job of funding us,” Jones said. “We’re hurt by the percentage of low-income students we have compared to those other districts, which tends to lead to lower dollars from the state, lower dollars from the federal government to offset what is our property tax base and, unfortunately, we have very little commercial real estate to help offset that as well.”