Dupage Policy Journal

Milton Township Tax Assessor Chris LeVan has fired back at Glenbard High School District 87 Superintendent David Larson’s claim that LeVan and his office were pursuing a vendetta in denying Larson’s property tax appeal on his nearly $1 million home in Glen Ellyn Springs – an appeal that would reduce the value of the home by a whopping $275,000.

“For Mr. Larson to suggest that an appeal to my office to lower his property assessment was denied out of some personal or political agenda on my part or my staff is a complete and total falsehood,” LeVan wrote in an Oct. 17 letter to the Milton Township board of trustees and Republican Reps. Jeanne Ives (Wheaton) and Peter Breen (Lombard), the floor leader. “His claim is contradicted by the facts, as well as the dedicated professionals working in my office that he has so unfairly maligned. His claims are outrageous and offensive, and nothing could be further from the truth.”

Larson slammed LeVan’s office after an Oct. 4 DuPage Policy Journal article detailed Larson’s appeal on the assessment of the property at 704 Chidester St. In a letter to school board members and friends, Larson wrote that the Journal “is angry with me regarding an editorial I wrote this summer in the Chicago Tribune about being wary of tuition tax credits and public funding of private schools. These folks (he referred to them earlier in the letter to as 'conservative watchdog group, anti-public education/Jeanne Ives gp.') must be well connected to Chris LeVan … and are using our pending tax appeal as a way to retaliate/discredit us.”

Chris Levan

But LeVan said that the assessment of the value of the Larson home at $948,785 is in line with other properties in the neighborhood and that Larson's claim that that the house was uninhabitable when he bought it could not be verified because Larson would not allow inspectors into the house.

LeVan also said that denying inspection of the house “would not sit well” with the DuPage Board of Review, where a formal appeal of the taxes had been scheduled for Oct. 26.

If Larson’s appeal is successful, his taxes on the property will drop by 40 percent.

Larson joined District 87 in 2012, moving from a school district in suburban Detroit. Earlier this year, his contract with the school district was extended for five years and his salary increased from $240,465 to $252,500 per year, before his taxpayer-funded pension contribution.

LeVan wrote in his letter than many Milton Township homeowners are on fixed incomes and “they are seeing their savings eroded due to ever-increasing property tax bills.”

“When homeowners challenge their assessments, whether they are one of the highest paid public employees in DuPage County, or a senior citizen living on social security, we treat all with the same respect and dignity they deserve," he wrote. "To suggest anything else, as Mr. Larson has, not only impugns my integrity but also the integrity of the hard working professional men and women of the Milton Township’s’ Assessors Office.”

The aforementioned commentary Larson published in the Chicago Tribune in March slammed private schools as inferior for "hiring younger teachers with no promise of permanent employment."

"This 'cheap labor' results in eroding the status and prestige of the teaching profession," he wrote.

Larson said parents who choose private schools are "weakening" and "fragmenting" their communities and "(eroding) the foundation of our ... democratic society," especially those who choose them for "religious or sectarian factors."

These parents should be chastised, Larson argued, for "(placing) a greater value on personal choice than the importance of equity, commonality and public accountability," presumably to leaders of monopoly public school systems like he is.