Grafton Township Assessor Candidate Al Zielinski Making Mailing

Al Zielinski

Al Zielinski

And, here’s what it looks like:

Alan Zielinski for Grafton Township Assessor

Dear fellow Grafton Township neighbor,I’m running for Grafton Township Assessor and ask for your vote on February 26th.

You deserve accurate property assessments.

For too long Grafton Township property owners have been forced to deal with wildly inaccurate assessments. Your only recourse was to take time away from your family, business and yourself to appeal.

That’s not right.

The current assessor blames three-year averaging, the McHenry County Assessor and the Board of Review.

However, the real cause is the township assessor’s lack of hard work and ineffectiveness in keeping-up with the gradual yet relentless decline in residential real estate values that started in 2008.

Rather than tracking monthly sales and frequently reassessing neighborhoods to keep-up with that decline, the current assessor took the easy route: transferring that workload and cost to you via appeals and excess taxes.

You deserve a hard-working certified appraiser as your assessor.
I’m a certified real estate appraiser with decades of valuation experience. My campaign is based on principles that will make your life easier by ensuring fair assessments.

Ethics                   Education                Experience                Empathy

The enclosed brochure and my web site explain in detail how each principle and I will work to your benefit.

I respect how hard you work for your money and care deeply about those barely making ends meet. I’ll return accuracy to your assessments to keep more money in your pockets and reduce the need for appeals so you have more time for yourself and family. But I can’t do it without two investments from you: your time and vote.

You deserve Al Zielinski as your Grafton Township Assessor.

Please make your voice heard this month by voting for me. If you want to volunteer, donate or just allow us to place a sign in your yard, please contact me at 815.245.0455.

In closing, happy New Year! Please accept my genuine wish for a very safe, enjoyable and prosperous 2013. A vote for me will help make that wish a reality.

Sincerely,

Alan Zielinski

PS: we couldn’t mail to everyone so please share this with your friends and neighbors. Thank you!
www.Al-for-Assessor.com
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In the Republican primary election, Zielinski is running against incumbent Bill Ottley.

Comments

Grafton Township Assessor Candidate Al Zielinski Making Mailing — 15 Comments

  1. Aren’t you the candidate who said that you would visit all 23,000 properties by June?

    When would you answer calls, meet with people, and do your paperwork?

    We all laughed at that remark when we heard you say it at your Forum in Sun City.

    Also, you were condescending when addressing us by using overly simplistic explanations of the taxation process.

    Finally, one or two homilies were enough but you must have had ten or more and by the final one my eyes were rolling!

  2. Actually, “wildly inaccurate” describes the showing Al had the Sun City candidate forum.

    For startes, he was clearly flustered and could not remember that property reviews need not occur annually.

    That nugget of info is pretty basic for the job and something I would expect a licensed real estate agent and candidate to remember.

    No thanks, Big Al.

  3. It’s not a question of “need,” it’s an issue of work ethic and property record card accuracy.

    I used the example of Cook County where houses were built but were still assessed as vacant land.

    I won’t let that happen in Grafton Township.

    How can an assessor assure the taxpayers the assessment rolls are accurate without looking at the properties?!

    I promised a work ethic worthy of election that no other candidate was willing to accept.

    It’s time the assessor’s office broke a sweat for the taxpayers!

  4. Ethics? Fair assessments?

    Hmmm, please check out the article on the First Electric Newspaper where an ethical judgement was not done by Zielinski.

    The article documents Mr. Zielinksi living with a woman who is not his wife for over a year, whom he refers to as “my significant other” and has 0% ownership in the property he is using for his voter registration in Grafton Township, where he is running for assessor in this year’s election!?

    But the article has information about how Zielinski failed to disclose to the board of review that he was living in the property he appraised when his girlfiend went before the Board of Review.

    Additionally, as in earlier comments, Zielinski crashed and burned at the Sun City assessors forum last week.

  5. Based on the overwhelming, positive response and donations our campaign has received since the Sun City forum, I can’t wait to “crash and burn” again!

    Regarding the “article”…

    (1) There was no ethics violation, only personal conjecture. If I missed it, please cite it and your source.

    (2) The appraisal had no impact on the sales price. The appraisal’s cover letter is dated 10/3/2011, 3 days AFTER the reported sale.

    (3) The sale price was established by three competing offers which, when combined with the property’s 700+ days on market, fulfilled every definition of market value and constituted an arm’s-length transaction.

    (4) As clearly pointed-out, the Board of Review used the sales price, not the appraisal, to set their assessed value. I will furnish the audio of that hearing to the Editor so he can post it on this forum if feasible. It also conveys the township assessor accepting the valid sale (after he woke-up and realized the weight of the data before him).

    So, we have:
    – a valid appraisal performed AFTER the sale,
    – a valid appraisal that WAS NOT USED by the Board of Review,
    – a valid appraisal that had NO IMPACT on the sales price and
    – a valid appraisal of a property in which I have NO ownership interest.

    All that piece of “investigative reporting” conveyed was that a valid appraisal of no consequence was performed!
    Woodward and Bernstein better watch out…

    I stand by my ethics.
    Unlike the incumbent, I would never spend taxpayer dollars paying family members.

    The incumbent took office 1/1/90.
    Because he didn’t speak with them/ask them to stay, two experienced deputy assessors left: Ms. Kunde and Mr. Domagalski.

    As of 2/8/90, the incumbent had hired his wife Carol and daughter Sherri. He later hired his other daughter Julie.
    The incumbent’s wife was the highest paid hourly employee and all family members received benefits.

    Between 1/1/06 and 12/31/12, the incumbent’s wife and two daughters accounted for 21% of the assessor’s payroll.assessor’s payroll.

    Now THAT’s a story!

  6. “Based on the overwhelming, positive response and donations our campaign has received since the Sun City forum…” Overwhelming donations? Really Al? Then tell me, how come I cannot find ANY record of this outpouring of financial support for you through the State Board of Elections website and viewing campaign disclosure reports for “Taxpayers behind Alan Zielinski for Assessor” committee? Surely, if you truly had received overwhelming responses in campaign donations, you’d have filed an A-1 by now, let alone filed a D-1 to form your political committee with the state board. Therefore, your boast about a positive infusion for your campaign cannot be verified, and is not accepted.

    So unless your lack of a D-1 is another one of your many ethical lapses, you have not yet cleared $3,000 in either donations, loans nor spending for your attempt to unseat a 6-term incumbent on February 26th. For your credibility, we better start seeing disclosure reports from you filed with the state. And, your primary opponent formed his political committee through a D-1 filed on January 17th. And your attempt to malign your opponent is an obvious fraud to defend your own shortcomings.

    So let me look at your questionable ethics:

    1) You did not disclose to the Board of Review that you were living with the petitioner (that alone in the context of an appeal, does not make the appraisal valid)

    2) Despite living with the owner of the property and changing your voter registration to owner’s McHenry County address, you continued to claim an owner-occupied property tax exemption for your Lake Barrington property in Lake County, until First Electric Newspaper uncovered the oversight (you claimed you forgot to send Lake County the paperwork, which a “Joe Citizen” could claim, but not someone who’s running for assessor in a different county).

    3) You staged a faux food pantry donation drive/campaign publicity stunt last October with your running mate, incumbent Supervisor Linda Moore, complete with big campaign banners with “Al-for-Assessor.com” with Ms. Moore openly campaigning for her own re-election, wearing a big “Re-elect Linda Moore” campaign button, and passing out her campaign literature. An ethical person, in the context of helping the less fortunate, would have had NO campaign advertising for his own campaign, and upon immediately seeing someone else campaigning for themself, they would have asked them to remove ALL of their campaign materials.

    4) You did not fully disclose WHICH food pantry was receiving the donations at that same event.

    5) You did not ask permission of the business owner where the food drive took place, after being asked to leave your original location because the business owner saw it was a campaign event.

    And those are the ones I can think of at the top of my head. Despite your boast, I see a shellacking in the making when Bob Ottley’s campaign boxes your ears at the ballot box on February 26th. Prove me wrong, but honestly, I’m not holding my breath.

  7. After this, I won’t waste people’s time by responding to untenable, trivial issues.

    For example, #4 above is ludicrous because the Illinois Raffle Act requires a permit. The Village of Huntley granted one thereby making disclosure mandatory.

    #5 is equally laughable: we were never “asked to leave.” Sammy’s Business Manager will confirm if necessary. I setup the tent outside so the Fuzzy White Dogs could stay cool, attract attention and we could could keep a constant eye on the donations trailer.

    Rather than indulge pointless banter, my responses on this and other sites will be limited to factual issues of consequence to the taxpayers of Grafton Township.

    They’ve endured far too many baseless aspersions for too long and deserve better.

    One such consequential issue is work ethic.

    I was initially mocked for my promise of no (well-founded) appeals by the conclusion of my second term until that premise was supported by the Independent candidate at the Sun City forum.

    The current mock-du-jour is my commitment to look at properties before I assess them.

    Seems like good business-sense to me!

    Besides, I’m accustomed to/comfortable with hard work and long days.

    22,000 parcels/52 weeks/5 days per week/current staff of 6 = 14 parcels/day per person.

    That’s no big deal given Grafton’s density and my commitment to hard work and accurate assessments for the taxpayers of Grafton Township.

    Perhaps if the incumbent had gotten out of the office more, taxpayers’ assessments wouldn’t have gotten so far out of alignment with their true market values.

  8. Pats himself on the back, just like the supervisor!

    Ottley has done a good job all along !

    Plain and simple!Re-elect Ottley!

  9. Nos. 1, 2 & 3 were not mentioned in your response, and you didn’t touch them, along with the fact you have no political committee yet claim to have had a huge amount of support financially.

    No worries, we will keep watching, and we expect you to fall and fall hard.

  10. They weren’t mentioned because the responses I did provide vividly showed your lack of credibility.

    ” I won’t waste people’s time by responding to untenable, trivial issues.”

  11. Al – once again you prove you don’t have a clue!

    So if you want all six employees to go out assessing homes, does that mean you will be working in the office and handling all the paperwork, visitors, questions, data transfers, emails, faxes, appeals, computer IT issues, board of review issues, county issues, and state ptax appeals by yourself???

    Not to mention that in order for the six employees to be out visiting these 14 properties per day you need to buy 4 or 5 more township vehicles.

    All this, and I have only addressed one of your points above!

    YOU REALLY HAVE NO CLUE!

  12. Will you also not waste our time and money by not trying to win a job that YOU HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO DO?

  13. Don’t forget running AssessmentBusters, GhostBusters, Rent-A-COO, and the PNA!

    Al still fails to see the conflict in representing for appeal, the woman he is shacking up with.

    Full disclosure Al?

  14. AL – you spew all of this stuff about how you would do things different when you should be asking, how are things done now? What can I do to improve upon them?

    Have you ever even visited the assessors office?

    Have you ever talked to anyone that works there?

    Have you ever asked how things are currently done?

    You just ASS-U-ME, and I am sure you know where that gets you.

    It doesn’t sound like you have invested any time to try and learn the process before you started shouting how you want to change it.

    You have been caught many times on this and other forums, not knowing how things are done, and at the debate you didn’t even know that it is 4 years vs. 1 year that properties must be visited. Logistically, you can’t do them all every year.

    If you win this election, I feel sorry for you and the people that work in the assessors office.

    You have already disrespected their efforts and the good work they do everyday.

    If you don’t believe that, read the comments about the customer service that is provided there.

    The assessors office is one of the only government offices that I have ever visited and left feeling good about my tax dollars being well spent.

    You may be an appraiser, but you are certainly no Assessor!

    I hope the public recognizes this, and remembers it on the ballot.

  15. Unless of course…you are going to have Linda running the office for you???

    And we all know how great she is with numbers!!!

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