A CLOSER LOOK AT COOK COUNTY TREASURER MARIA PAPPAS, the LADY-IN-CHARGE OF THE $18 BILLION A YEAR MONEY OF THE COOK COUNTY

‘I value my relationship with Veronica. Her appointment as an Honorary Deputy Cook County Treasurer was a huge help in  reaching the community with information regarding exemptions, refunds and taxes. I value our friendship and trust that God figured out how to put us together and celebrate this life’ — Maria Pappas, Cook County Treasurer

THE name MARIA PAPPAS, COOK COUNTY TREASURER, does not need an official introduction in Cook County or, perhaps, elsewhere. She stands out even minus her presence. Her name rings a bell and stands for FUN, FRIENDLY, and FEISTY for a good reason. At the 2019 celebration of the silver anniversary of the CHICAGO FILIPINO ASIAN AMERICAN HALL OF FAME, Treasurer Maria, who was one of the Awardees, surprised the fun-loving Filipino Americans when, immediately after the Award ceremony, she joined the frisky and sassy group in their “creative on the spot,” anything goes frolics in singing and dancing. The Treasurer had so much FUN! One guest commented: “Oh, my. Treasurer Pappas is indeed a People Person!”

Speaking about her ethnicity, she said: “ I grew up speaking Greek, and as a Greek American in a small town, I have valued ethnic Americans. My website is up to 126 languages. I visited the Philippines because I have had so many Filipino friends in my life, either at my husband’s hospital, Thorek Memorial Hospital, or my personal physician and people from all walks of life,” she said with her familiar big smile.

Her election for the sixth time last November 2018, has shown that the Maria Pappas name has been a bell-ringer to over 1.5 million voters! No sweat.

One of her office brochures states: “Cook County is one of the world’s largest economies, with 5.2 million people and the nation’s third-largest city — Chicago. The Treasurer’s Office handles $18 billion a year, almost $13 billion in property taxes on some 1.8 million parcels of property. The property tax revenues then must be distributed to 2,200 local government agencies such as municipalities, school districts, police and fire districts, library district and others that tax properties. It has to be done right and it has to be done fast.”

Treasurer Pappas’ people experience includes: as a psychologist for 10 years in private practice working in Chicago ghettos; as a lawyer which led to her becoming a Cook County Commissioner; “professions and experiences which gave her the opportunity to meet thousands of interesting people. A life’s experience she is very proud of.

Treasurer Maria is proud of her Cretan immigrants parents. She was raised in Warwood, West Virginia, a town of 2,000, near the coal-mining city of Wheeling. As a child, she studied the Greek language and all kinds of music. She played the electronic pipe organ, directed the choir and traveled around the country with the all-state band as bass clarinetist. As a drum majorette, she won nine gold medals in baton-twirling competitions.

Education is her life-long passion. Pappas earned a degree in Sociology from West Liberty State College (now University), in West Liberty, West Virginia, in 1970; a degree in Guidance and Counseling at West Virginia University in Morgantown in 1972; a doctorate in Counseling and Psychology at Loyola University of Chicago in 1976; and a law degree at Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1982.

Coming to Chicago, Pappas’ public career grew out of her studies at what is now Adler University and a grant from the Illinois Attorney General’s Office to work in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens public housing project. At Altgeld Gardens, she managed the Day One Drug Abuse Center, keeping young people free of drugs. Testifying in related court cases involving young people led her to visit prisons and jails, which led her to go to law school,

Pappas won for eight years as a Commissioner, representing Chicago’s North Side and North Shore suburbs. As a County Commissioner, she made every meeting interesting and built a reputation as a budget guru, a fiscal hawk who supported tax cuts, open government and efficiencies in an inefficient government – which she let people know about. She successfully fought for human rights ordinances and introduced measures to install reform in areas such as truth-in-lending budgeting, ending no-bid legal and bond-issue contracts, and status reports by outside consultants. She co-authored an extensive study on teenage pregnancy, outlining a program to combat a key societal issue.

With a vision of making her office paperless, Pappas kept changing things, innovating, turning the office into a networked system of computers that integrated collections, deposits, earnings, distributions, refunds and other data previously logged manually. An integrated cashiering and general-ledger system resulted in speedier access to payment and other data for taxpayers and local government agencies.

She established a website, cookcountytreasurer.com, that averages 450,000 visits a month so taxpayers can live the paperless life, checking their payments, searching for refunds, seeing their exemptions, and more. Her Debt Disclosure Ordinance of 2009 provides taxpayers an up-close view of the debts, operational and pension-related, of the governments that tax them – information that goes also on tax bills mailed to taxpayers. Pappas is proud of this extraordinary exercise in data transparency, saying taxpayers now can monitor their governments and the taxes they levy.

Pappas is especially proud of the Debt Disclosure Ordinance (DDO), an unprecedented step for transparency in government. The DDO came out of questions she encountered from taxpayers about rising taxes. Recognizing that taxpayers needed to actually see how much of their taxes were going to which local governments (taxing districts), Pappas oversaw design of a system that shows how much each taxing district is billing taxpayers

Pappas’ website has enormous amounts of information about the property tax system, and her office designed cookcountytreasurer.com to be interactive and informative. Not only can taxpayers pay current and prior-year taxes online, they also can check payment status, search for refunds and check on exemptions. The website offers downloadable forms and applications, information on mortgage escrow, and answers to frequently asked questions.

The office’s phone system, 312.443.5100, gives assistance in English, Polish and Spanish. As on the website, the phone system allows taxpayers to determine payment status, search for refunds going back 20 years and verify property tax exemptions.

Cook County is one of the nation’s most diverse counties and Pappas’ website addresses that diversity with brochures in print and on the website in Albanian, Arabic, Assyrian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, English, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Spanish, Thai, Ukrainian and Urdu. All the above shows how much Treasurer Pappas believes in communication.

My personal association with Treasurer Pappas was made closer by one of her former employees, Mrs. Pat Michalski, an “Adopted Daughter” of the Filipino American community, now retired. Among Ms. Pappas’ community projects, one which impresses me most is her annual celebration of “Christmas Around the World” in December, participated by all foreign nations in Chicago making her Cook County Office an International scene. This is how Cook County Treasurer MARIA PAPPAS shows her personal concerns to ALL FOREIGN COMMUNITIES in Chicago. The only politician so far to have thought about doing it.

A “political Egghead” once told me: “MARIA PAPPAS for MAYOR of CHICAGO?” Good thinking, Amigos!.