Aasi Siddique's Campaign Platform

Aasi Siddique will officially release a comprehensive, fully funded technical and legal turnaround roadmap to overhaul the county's broken Integrated Property Tax System (IPTS). The initiative will directly address a decade of software fragmentation and system delays between the independent offices of the Assessor, Clerk, and Treasurer that have frozen $216 million in property tax distributions to local school districts and stalled $56 million in delayed refund checks owed to 25,000 area property owners.

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Cook County taxpayers are tired of the constant multi-agency finger-pointing and costly vendor delays," said Aasi Siddique. "Our independent county offices have been running on incompatible databases for too long, forcing school districts to take out high-interest short-term loans to pay teachers, and leaving families waiting months for their overpayment refunds. Our campaign will present a concrete, enterprise-grade technical blueprint to permanently and legally bind these independent offices into a single, secure cloud data standard on Day One.

 

We will not cut a single public service or neighborhood infrastructure project. We will be funding it entirely by eliminating structural technical waste that currently costs taxpayers millions. Right now, Cook County is paying to maintain three completely separate, aging legacy mainframe systems. Decommissioning those individual silos saves us $18.5 million in unnecessary maintenance and licensing fees. Furthermore, by consolidating the printing and mailing operations of all three offices into a single, unified notice, we save $9.5 million in redundant postage and paper. We will not be taking money away from the public; we will be stopping the county from paying three times for the same data processing

 

What Will Modernization Mean for You and Your Family Under Aasi Siddique' Leadership

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1. Faster Property Tax Refunds

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• The Old Way: If you accidentally overpaid your property tax bill, your money was frequently trapped inside broken databases for months. Staff had to manually check rows of text files line by line to fix simple formatting typos.

• The New Fixed Way: Our new automated validation system instantly cross-checks and cleans text errors between databases. This allows the county to process your overpayment safely and return your delayed refund checks to your physical mailbox in days instead of months.

2. Guaranteed Protection for Your Exemptions

• The Old Way: Seniors, disabled veterans, and fixed-income homeowners frequently had to manually re-file application paperwork across separate offices because the old databases failed to sync.

• The New Fixed Way: We have introduced a strict, unalterable system rules contract called a Unified Schema Lock. Once your exemption is verified by the Assessor, it is safely locked into the code. It automatically flows to your Clerk calculations and your Treasurer billing, ensuring you always get the exact property tax relief you are legally owed.

3. Complete Transparency and Safety

• Real-Time Text Updates: You no longer have to wait or guess your records' status. You can sign up for simple text-message alerts that track your property application or refund file directly through the system.

• Fiscally Neutral Construction: This $55-million upgrade carried a net property tax impact of exactly zero dollars ($0.00) to our residents. We funded the entire system integration by clearing out internal government waste, merging multi-office print mailings, and decommissioning expensive legacy mainframes.