The Cook County Assessor’s Office at 118 N. Clark Street was operating on Thursday with the particular energy of a workplace where everyone has just learned the boss is leaving but hasn’t left yet — a state of organizational purgatory that sources inside the building described variously as “tense,” “awkward,” and “like the last week of summer camp, if summer camp determined your property taxes.”

Fritz Kaegi, the two-term assessor who branded himself a reformer and largely self-funded his campaigns, conceded the Democratic primary to Lyons Township Assessor Pat Hynes on Tuesday night after trailing 47.5 percent to 52.5 percent with 88 percent of the estimated vote counted. Because no Republican filed for the position, Hynes is expected to become the next assessor when Kaegi’s term ends in December — a nine-month interregnum that multiple county employees said they were “not looking forward to” in the way that one does not look forward to a dental cleaning that has been scheduled but cannot be rescheduled.

“It’s a weird vibe,” said one staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were, in their words, “still employed here for now.” “Half the office is pretending nothing happened. The other half is updating their LinkedIn profiles during lunch. There’s a third group that’s doing both, which I realize is three halves, but that’s kind of the point — nothing adds up right now.”

The race itself hinged on a question that sounds simple but is, in Cook County, approximately as simple as string theory: who should decide what your property is worth? Kaegi ran on a transparency platform, arguing that his office had modernized assessment practices and reduced the inequities that historically shifted tax burdens onto lower-income homeowners. Hynes countered that Kaegi’s assessments had sent property tax bills on the South and West sides skyrocketing, and that his reforms had created as many problems as they solved. Both campaigns spent the final weeks accusing each other of being in the pocket of various real estate interests, a rhetorical strategy that in Cook County politics is roughly equivalent to accusing someone of breathing.

Hynes, who has spent 20 years as an appraiser for the assessor’s office, positioned herself as an insider who understood the machinery well enough to fix it without dismantling it. Her campaign raised more than $2 million, and Kaegi’s team was quick to point out that nearly half of that came from property tax attorneys, appraisers, and other real estate professionals — the very ecosystem that the assessor’s office is supposed to regulate. Hynes’s team responded that Kaegi had spent roughly $3 million of his own money, which they characterized as “a man buying an election” and which Kaegi characterized as “investing in public service,” a distinction that depends entirely on which side of the transaction you are standing on.

Inside the office, the practical implications of the transition are already becoming apparent. Several mid-level employees told The Dispatch that they had received no official communication about what the change in leadership would mean for their positions. “We assess properties,” said one analyst, staring at a spreadsheet that appeared to contain approximately eleven thousand rows. “That’s the job. Whether Fritz or Pat or a sentient algorithm is in charge, these parcels still need values. The parcels don’t care about elections.” She paused. “Sometimes I envy the parcels.”

County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who won her own Democratic primary on Tuesday, declined to comment on the assessor’s transition specifically but noted that “the continuity of county operations is always a priority during leadership changes.” When asked whether she had spoken with Hynes about transition planning, a spokesperson for Preckwinkle’s office said the president was “focused on governing” — a phrase that, in the lexicon of Cook County politics, means roughly the same thing as the Department of Streets and Sanitation saying it is “monitoring” something.

For the residents of Cook County, the transition raises a question that no one in the assessor’s office is quite prepared to answer: will their property taxes go up, go down, or stay the same? The honest answer — that it depends on a staggeringly complex interplay of assessed values, equalization factors, tax rates set by dozens of overlapping jurisdictions, and a formula that most tax attorneys describe as “technically public but functionally incomprehensible” — is not the kind of answer that wins elections. But it is the kind of answer that keeps assessors’ offices staffed with people who stare at spreadsheets with eleven thousand rows and occasionally envy the parcels. The work, as they say, continues. The boss may change. The spreadsheets do not.