As of Feb. 3, Cook County owes LT millions of dollars in tax payments that were supposed to be received by September. Without proper distributions, the school loses potential earnings from interest and may have to take precautionary measures to maintain operations. 

“What’s really frustrating is that this feels like it’s a situation that should be completely avoidable, and for whatever reason, here we are,” Director of Business Services Brian Stachacz said. “We’ve had pretty much zero communication from anybody at the county level, [which] tells me that they don’t have much to say, [and] this is an issue that still needs a lot of work. I hope that’s not the case, but that’s what it feels like.”

About 10 years ago, the county decided that they were going to change and modernize their software for the process of generating tax bills, collecting tax dollars, and recording the distributions to all of the individual taxing bodies, Stachacz said. This has resulted in a delay of both the collection and the distribution of the current property taxes that are due to taxing bodies such as LT. 

“It does not happen every year,” Stachacz said. “However, it has happened more frequently in the last six years, [and] this is the latest and most severe delay I’ve seen of all of them, though. I understand [a] transition like that could take some time, [but] Cook County and the technology company Tyler Technologies should have had a better handle on this, especially for the amount of time that this has gone [on].”

In 2015, Tyler Technologies signed a $30 million contract with Cook County to upgrade and digitize the county’s existing 1970s-era property tax systems. In October of 2016, the company missed its first major deadline in a series of multiple deadlines. Around the same time, Tyler Technologies signed two other contracts with Cook County, totaling to $75 million. Since then, these projects have exceeded $250 million due to delays, fixes, and more. 

“That’s simply unacceptable,” Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas said in a statement to the Chicago Sun Times. “Local governments shouldn’t have to worry about their cash flow because a vendor, after more than a decade of work, has failed to deliver a working system.”

About 92% of LT’s annual revenue comes from property taxes, Stachacz said. Cook County would have normally distributed this money in September of 2025; however, only over winter break did LT receive two distributions totaling $29 million, which is around half of what is still owed. 

“We have had enough cash on hand to continue to operate the district, so we’re fortunate in that respect,” Stachacz said. “ The other issue is that we take the dollars [that] would have been distributed to us, [and] we invest those. Hopefully, this is only short-term, but those dollars that we lost on interest earnings we’re never going to get back. Other districts’ taxing bodies have had to go out and borrow money in order to continue to operate. That’s not ideal because you also [pay] interest back on that.” 

According to the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark, some estimates show a county-wide loss of $121.8 million in interest. 

“We are now in a liquidity crisis,” District 95 Superintendent Ryan Evans said in a statement to the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark. “The damage has been done, and everything has not been resolved.”

In December, before any distributions had been made, Stachacz was preparing to take a resolution to the board to borrow money if needed, Stachacz said. He knew LT had enough cash to get through February, but it could take three to four weeks to obtain funds under short-term borrowing. If future distributions are not made in a timely manner, this will again reopen as a possibility.

“I’m working with other school districts, and we are putting together some data that will show how much money the county still owes everybody,” Stachacz said. “We have sort of a cohort group that is going to meet. What we’re trying to do is make people aware of the impact that this is having on the taxing bodies in Cook County. We are trying to make it known that this has to be corrected quickly.”