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| Admits he is an idiot |
Chris Kennedy admits error, but still blames BerriosTuesday, Jan 23, 2018
* As we discussed yesterday, Chris Kennedy erroneously claimed that the Cook County Assessor had valued the Hyatt Center at $160 million even though the building has a $385 million mortgage. The assessor’s office pointed out that Kennedy didn’t do his homework because the building is actually valued
for tax purposes at $382 million, reduced on appeal by the Cook County Board of Review from the assessor’s initial $396 valuation.
Greg Hinz caught up with the gubernatorial candidate today…
for tax purposes at $382 million, reduced on appeal by the Cook County Board of Review from the assessor’s initial $396 valuation.
Greg Hinz caught up with the gubernatorial candidate today…
Today, in a phone call, Kennedy admitted his error, agreeing with Berrios that he’d looked at only some and not all of the Property Index Numbers that cover the property and its assessment.
“I’m conceding that we are missing PIN numbers,” Kennedy told me in a phone call. “The error is on me,” and not the campaign worker—a former employee of the assessor’s office whom Kennedy declined to name—who researched the matter before yesterday’s news conference.
If Berrios ran a truly open and modern office, he wouldn’t rely on multiple PINs for the same property, some of them with different street addresses, Kennedy said.
“Why do we have five different PINs? Why can’t we collapse them into one. . . .That’s just one of the signs that (Berrios’) system lacks transparency.”
Berrios’ office denied that the system is complicated, particularly for someone such as Kennedy, who ran the Merchandise Mart for years and is developing high-end apartment towers at Wolf Point.
“He’s incompetent on this issue,” Shaer said. “His family has made billions of dollars on real estate.”
