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County Treasurer Pappas can help you understand your property taxes in virtually any language
By Maria Pappas
The property tax system can confound lifelong Cook County residents. Assessments, appeals, exemptions and other parts of the process can be difficult to understand.
Now imagine you immigrated from a place that didn’t have property taxes. Many countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere do not tax real estate. You buy a home a settle in the Chicago area and one day an unexpected tax bill arrives in the mail. You have no idea what it means.
My office has been helping people understand their tax bills and the property tax system in virtually any language for many years. That’s why I reach out to so many different ethnic communities and participate in so many cultural events and activities every year.
Our multilingual outreach includes:
- Short informational videos that explain the property tax system at com in six languages: English, Spanish, Polish, Cantonese, Mandarin and Arabic
- A website that can be translated into 133 languages
- A brochure about the property tax system that is available in English and 27 other languages.
The videos describe how you may be eligible for a refund. They tell you how to use your address to search at cookcountytreasurer.com. Refunds for overpayments are available going back 20 years and refunds for missed tax breaks called exemptions are available going back four years.
At the bottom of the homepage at cookcountytreasurer.com you’ll see a prompt where you can use Google Translate to convert the website from English to one of 133 different languages.
My office’s brochure, “The Property Tax System,” contains useful information for property owners. The brochure is offered in English and 27 other languages: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Filipino, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Spanish, Thai, Ukrainian, Urdu and Vietnamese.
Many Cook County residents speak Spanish in their households. My extensive outreach in Hispanic communities includes the weekly 30-minute radio show, “Latino Houses Matter,” which airs at noon Mondays on WRLL-AM 1450. Spanish-speaking hosts explain how to check for potential refunds and answer questions from callers.
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Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
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