For the business leaders and property owners who were already sour on Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi and his wave of sweeping changes to the county’s tax assessment system, 2020 did little to put them at ease.

In April, Kaegi shocked property owners and other county officials when he announced his office would send new valuations to millions of property owners all across the county that took into account the economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Kaegi pitched the overhaul of the office’s typical assessment system as a way to give property owners a more accurate read on how much they should owe in property taxes in 2021.

Related: Kaegi defends overhauling reassessments on short deadline: ‘We don’t have a lot of great choices’

The assessor’s office last week closed out its valuation process for the year, including a scheduled top-to-bottom reassessment of Chicago’s south and west suburbs, and the results are broadly similar to his office’s 2019 work: assessments rose more sharply on large office and apartment buildings than single-family homes, radically shifting the property tax burden onto commercial properties to the benefit of homeowners. Except this year, some real estate interests and local officials say Kaegi’s “Covid factor” adjustment has only emphasized that shift, endangering businesses that are already struggling to survive the pandemic.

Related: North-suburban assessments could mean for break homeowners, ‘straight-up terror’ for commercial owners

But this year’s assessments have led Downtown building owners to doubt whether their properties will be assessed fairly in 2021, according to Farzin Parang, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago.

“From all the data we’ve seen, this COVID adjustment seems to have been a little bit of a fiasco,” Parang said. “Because of what the assessor is doing, we’re seeing an outsized impact punishing businesses, small and large, at the worst possible time. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Businesses have felt the impact most sharply in the county’s so-called “south triad,” the 17 west and south-suburban townships that underwent reassessments this year.

Commercial and industrial properties in the south triad saw their assessed values jump by 44 percent between 2019 and 2020 and apartment buildings with seven or more units saw an 80 percent spike in assessments, while the total assessed value of single-family homes and small apartment buildings ticked up just 4 percent. That means the commercial and industrial owners now own more than 30 percent of all assessed property in the south and west suburbs, compared to 24 percent in 2019, according to the assessor’s latest numbers.

Meanwhile, Kaegi’s final assessments of Chicago and its north suburbs shrank overall by 3 percent and 4 percent respectively, driven by drops in the valuations of residential properties while commercial assessments ticked up. However, the city and north triad will almost certainly see sharp spikes in their assessments in 2021 and 2022, when they are respectively scheduled to be reassessed by Kaegi’s office.

Those numbers will not directly translate into residents’ property tax bills, in part because valuations will go through another change after the Cook County Board of Review works through its backlog of tens of thousands of appeals during the next several months. The assessor’s raw 2020 figures also do not account for special exemptions nor levies imposed by the nearly 2,000 taxing bodies that draw from properties across the county.

Related: Victory in hand, Wendt plunges into historic appeals backlog with big power over property taxes

Still, the shift in the county’s overall tax burden has put a scare into business owners in the south suburbs, which were already at a “disadvantage” with higher tax rates than their neighbors in Indiana and Will County, according to Kristi DeLaurentiis, executive director of the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association.

Some larger office and industrial buildings saw “huge swings” in their assessments, tripling or more under Kaegi’s math this year, she said. Even “main street, mom-and-pop storefronts” have seen their valuations jump 30 or 40 percent, far outpacing assessments on houses.

“We're concerned that significant increases in tax bills may be the nail in the coffin for businesses that already suffered during the pandemic and civil unrest,” DeLaurentiis told The Daily Line. “It could be the final straw.”

DeLaurentiis testified at a Cook County Board of Commissioners Finance Committee meeting last week that Kaegi’s reassessments, including his office’s adjustment to account for the pandemic, could “exacerbate” the headwinds faced by struggling businesses.

The meeting also saw testimony from south suburban officials like Hazel Crest Mayor Vernard Alsberry, who said his village of about 14,000 people had been “struggling for many years…and the new assessments have made that even more difficult.”

Kaegi responded with a version the same argument he has used to defend his controversial assessment practices since early 2019: that his numbers are different because they reflect the most accurate real estate data, unlike Berrios, who was widely blamed for artificially deflating commercial valuations.

“There are communities where there are always going to be folks who don't like the effect, but it is not appropriate for me to put my thumb on the scale to achieve the political desire that an elected official might have,” Kaegi told commissioners. “Our whole job is to assess market values. The minute that I inject politics into the valuation process is the minute this office gets off the rails like it had been for so long.”

In an interview with The Daily Line on Wednesday, Kaegi also noted that the total assessed value for all south- and west-suburban properties grew by about 16 percent since last year, indicating growth in the region’s tax base despite its loss in population, and a signal that tax rates could decline overall.

He also credited his office’s “COVID factor” readjustment for helping to even the playing field for small business owners who otherwise may have seen even larger assessment hikes.

“We bent over backwards to incorporate the impact of COVID in everyone’s assessments,” Kaegi said. “Imagine if we didn't take that impact into account. That would have been inequitable, especially to the folks who don't use appeals system to the max.”

Kaegi stands by ‘Covid factor’ adjustment

Kaegi unveiled the “Covid factor” adjustment in May, about a month after he announced his office would take the unprecedented step of starting over on the assessment process four months after it got underway.

The blanket adjustment took 10 percent off the assessed value of the median single-family home in the south triad and 13 percent off the average apartment building with six units or fewer, according to a 16-page report the assessor’s office published in the spring detailing the office’s methodology. The adjustment cut the valuation of dining and entertainment-based retailers while leaving grocery stores and medical offices untouched, and it tied values to unemployment rates.

Related: Small landlords, neighborhood retailers benefit from Kaegi’s ‘Covid factor’ reassessments

Kaegi said his team based its calculations on the  Case Schiller Home Price Index and real estate services firms like CBRE, as well as publicly traded securities data, which showed in April that home prices were taking a dive amid the pandemic.

But in the months since, the opposite has occurred. The median home sale price for the Chicago Metropolitan Area ticked up from $244,000 in February to $270,000 in November, according to Redfin. Hazel Crest saw an even more dramatic jump in its median sale price, nearly doubling from $46,000 to $89,000 during the same period, Redfin data shows.

The added break for homeowners ended up saddling businesses with higher assessments than they deserved, said Parang, whose organization represents office landlords.

“In what world would telling people to work from home hurt the value of homes more than the businesses, which were essentially all shut down?” Parang said. “It’s a huge mess.”

Still, Kaegi on Wednesday stood by his office’s May methodology, saying it was based on the most accurate information available at the time.

“When we have to pick a point in time, we’re not supposed to be predictive,” Kaegi said. “We’re supposed to call it where it was at that time. And single-family portfolios have gone up since April, but that’s where we had to cut it off.”

The assessor also pointed to a report published in September by the International Association of Assessing Officers that found Berrios’ team in 2018 assessed Chicago properties around half their true market value, mostly because the assessor’s office undervalued large commercial buildings at the time. Shifting a greater burden onto offices, industrial buildings and large apartment complexes is a sign that the gap is closing, and properties are being assessed more fairly, Kaegi said.

“People can quibble that residential housing since April might have gone up a couple percentage points, but how does that compare with being 40 or 50 percent off on commercial [property valuations]?” Kaegi said. “We’re much closer on estimating market values than we were coming into this reassessment cycle.”