Most Oak Parkers felt the sting of property tax increases in 2006, when fall tax bills arrived like a prizefighter delivering a one-two punch.

First, taxes rose a dizzying average of 12.9 percent over the previous year.

Then, because the entire year's increase is dumped on the fall bill after a reassessment, many residents received knee-buckling bills that were twice what they paid in the spring.

The effect undoubtedly knocked some families out of Oak Park.

In the middle of tax bills, spending, and an effort to reduce spending, you'll find Ali ElSaffar, the Oak Park Township assessor. The title is a bit of a misnomer-he doesn't assess-but thousands have contacted his office in recent years for help in filing tax appeals.

"This year was a really tough year," said ElSaffar, who became assessor in 2001. "I felt sometimes like I was more therapist than tax assessor."

For the tears shed in his office this year, for his ongoing efforts to teach residents about the Rube Goldbergian way Cook County assesses taxes, and for taking the extra step to advocate for lower taxes, we name ElSaffar Oak Park's Villager of the Year in 2006.

What's in a name?

If taxes bore you, the Ali ElSaffar story will not. A kind, thoughtful and intelligent man, ElSaffar rises above the stereotypical elected official: Appearance are not deceiving, and self-promotion is replaced by concern for the public-all undertaken with a genuine, almost boyish demeanor.

He drives a Honda Civic Hybrid, but walks to work when he can. He starting riding horses with the distant notion that perhaps one day he would saddle up at home and ride to work.

Consider this: ElSaffar-whose two siblings are both professional musicians-owns five CDs. Five. "I'm not that into music," he said, before doubling over in hysterical laughter at what he was about to say. Four of his five CDs are by 1980s "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" singer Cyndi Lauper. "There was a girl I liked in high school and Cyndi Lauper reminded me a lot of this girl," he said. His fifth CD is by Johnny Cash.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, ElSaffar saw himself as a regular American guy with a funny name, kind of like U.S. Sen. Barack Obama. ElSaffar attended college in Grinnell, Iowa. He felt right at home in a small town where you could write a check for lunch at Hardee's.

After the terrorist attacks, and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feelings stirred in this country as a result, his name took on greater importance.

"You look at my name or [Obama's] name ... and you don't know what to expect," ElSaffar said. "And then you meet me, and it's oh, he's just a regular guy. I don't want to go around saying I'm breaking down stereotypes because not everybody has those stereotypes. But if people have a stereotyped view of an Arab, and they meet me, they can't help but rethink that view."

An early start in politics

ElSaffar grew up in River Forest. He and his sister, Dena, 34, and his brother, Amir, 29, all attended Oak Park and River Forest High School. His dad is from Iraq, his mother from the U.S., the two having met on a cruise ship in 1960. Passengers tried to guess where the elder ElSaffar was from, so he would give hints, like the name of the president of his country. She was the only one who knew it was Gen. Ahmed Hassan. "Maybe it was serendipity," ElSaffar said.

He's not religious. Unless serendipity is a religion. His father is Muslim, while his mother, who died in 1994, was Protestant. "My mother didn't really care that much about how I was raised. My dad wanted me, I think in theory, to grow up with the same religion as him. He just didn't have the patience to do it," ElSaffar said.

"I remember once he took me to a mosque, I was 6 or 7. ... And that was the extent of my religious training as a child." He suspects the trips out to Northbrook were too much of a hassle. "It was a fairly secular household, I would say."

Mom grew up a military kid and became a professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dad, who was part of Iraq's civilian nuclear program in the 1960s, taught physics at DePaul.

The family planned to live in Iraq and lived in Bagdad shortly after Ali was born. But the 1967 Arab-Israeli War intervened. ElSaffar's father felt it unwise to stay in Iraq, especially with an American wife. Six months after moving there, they left for the U.S.

From Iraq to Grinnell, Iowa?

"For me, that was part of the draw. There was something appealing to me about living in a small town," ElSaffar said. Flipping through a book of colleges he had one of those serendipitous moments. "I knew that's where I wanted to go."

The small-town atmosphere gave him a glimpse of "a different way of looking at the world, and relating to one another," he said. "I wasn't disappointed."

His interest in politics started early, serving as vice president and president of student government at Grinnell College. As vice president, he was the "chief student prosecutor," the college believing that students should discipline their own. "It took awhile to get used to that role."

But the quasi-legal position led him to law school at the University of Iowa. He graduated in 1991.

Two years later, at 26, he made his first of three consecutive bids for the Oak Park village board running as an independent. All were unsuccessful.

"I felt comfortable running as an independent," he said.

Fourth time's the charm

ElSaffar started his career in property management at a young age, cutting grass on his father's properties. After law school, he started a property management business and a small real estate law practice, which he continues to do while being assessor (the supposedly 20-hour-a-week township job pays less than $30,000).

The money doesn't concern him. "I enjoy talking $135 million tax levies, but my own finances, no, I'm not that interested in money in that respect," he said. "I like helping people, and if I have a talent where I can help people, I like to do it."

During his first campaign for the board in 1993, ElSaffar met Galen Gockel, who was running for township assessor and later served on the village board from 2001-05. Gockel is now serving on the board in an interim role.

Gockel knew of Grinnell, and he and ElSaffar became friends. Six years later, ElSaffar found himself wandering around Oak Park one day thinking about how he could serve his community. He felt a strong cosmic voice telling him that serving on the village board was not something he was supposed to do.

He liked the idea of being township assessor, but thought it would be uncomfortable asking Gockel if he would run for re-election at the end of his term. Within a week, he heard that Gockel planned to run for the village board, so he gave him a call. Serendipity. "I think sometimes the world works that way," ElSaffar said.

It worked that way again, in fact, a few years later when he thought he'd like to do more of what he was doing at the township. He wondered what he could do that would be like being the assessor.

"The next day I got a call from Berwyn saying, 'Would you like to be our assessor?'" he said. "So I thought, here's my answer. I wanted to do something more, here's my chance."

Fluent in Spanish, ElSaffar was a perfect match for Berwyn, which has a "very strong" Spanish-speaking population. And it was good for the assessor's language skills.

"I knew how to speak Spanish but I didn't know how to say 'homeowner exemption.' They didn't teach that in Spanish class."

A busy year

As if having two assessor jobs weren't enough, taxes in Oak Park have been a growing concern for residents, making more work for the assessor. After the 2002 reassessment, his office saw a 70-percent increase in calls to verify and appeal tax bills.

His part-time job as assessor consumed his life for much of the year.

ElSaffar uses a heat wave analogy. It's not one factor that has contributed to tax-bill angst, but a series of them: referenda for new middle schools, a new library, parks, and the high school have all turned up the heat. Then OPRF extended its referendum, creating a greater burden on taxpayers, ElSaffar said.

But that's not all. Overall government spending in Oak Park has increased by 53 percent since 2000, compared to inflation's growth of 17 percent, ElSaffar says, a practice that taxpayers can't likely afford to continue.

"We're a very big-hearted community in Oak Park," ElSaffar said. But "I think there's a growing realization that being concerned about taxes doesn't mean you're miserly, or curmudgeonly, or cheap or not public-spirited."

Further, pushing up the metaphorical mercury last year was the elimination of the longtime homeowner's exemption for low- and moderate-income families, which affected 6 percent of households in Oak Park. The most striking example of its effects for ElSaffar was when a woman came into his office hoping there was some mistake with her tax bill. When he found that there was none, she started crying.

Her husband had died; she had a couple of kids. "She was saying, between her tears, that her goal was just to hang on until her son could graduate" from OPRF, ElSaffar said.

Education to ease the pain

ElSaffar saw the tax bill problem coming and started warning people in 2005. He urged the high school against extending its referendum another year, something the district was legally able to do but, he said, wasn't what voters had approved.

One of the biggest events in 2006, he said, was the August tax forum he co-hosted. It showed that people support good schools, libraries, etc., but that the tax bills are becoming too big. One woman that evening described her decision to leave Oak Park as being like an amicable divorce, ElSaffar recalled.

When the bills hit, ElSaffar's office was flooded with calls. It was more than he and Deputy Assessor Shelly Dunlap could handle, and they had to hire someone just to answer the approximately 75 daily voicemail messages. Most people called just to vent, ElSaffar said, "but it takes a while for people to vent."

ElSaffar was a regular contributor to this paper's Viewpoints and HomeFront sections this year, and a regular source, too, sending news in advance of higher tax bills, the elimination of the longtime homeowner's exemption, and other community issues.

"I certainly tried to educate people," ElSaffar said in December before leaving for a three-week overseas vacation. "Nothing helps more than knowledge. People are upset but at least they have some sort of understanding of why things are going on."

ElSaffar said government officials have begun to notice the tax impact on Oak Park residents. He points to a recent attempt to temporarily help School District 97 with village TIF funds as an example of how policy is beginning to shift.

"If we can use all the talent we have in Oak Park to find ways to do more with less," he said, "I think we can do it."

ElSaffar is part of that talent. He has made his office more efficient, automating what had been tedious, time-consuming processes. He helped create computer software that finds comparable houses-necessary when filing an appeal-with a click of a button, rather than by poring over pages of a book.

"We can do appeals very, very quickly now," he said. The problem is, the demand for tax appeals has skyrocketed. He expects 2007 to be a "relatively quiet year."

A growing Arabic identity

ElSaffar says he and his siblings all try to bridge the gap between the Western and Arabic worlds. After 9/11, they all decided to learn to speak Arabic.

"Part of the reason was that I thought it was strange that I had this obviously Arabic name, but I spoke English and Spanish," ElSaffar said. "I just wanted to know more about where I came from."

His December vacation in fact took him to England, Spain and Morocco, where he took a week-long conversational Arabic class (Spain was for riding horses, England to see his half-sisters).

Politics, his name and his identity are intertwined. "There are so few elected officials with obviously Arabic names-in the whole country, really," he said. "A lot of immigrant groups have always felt that somehow you've made it in society if one of your own gets elected to some position, whatever the position may be."

ElSaffar said he felt something similar when, as Berwyn assessor, he was able to speak to Mexican-American residents in Spanish about their tax bills.

"The tax system is hard enough to understand if you speak English. But I think it was more than that, that there's a connection to your government."

So politics will likely continue to be in ElSaffar's future.

"I'm pretty sure I don't want to do the village board thing," ElSaffar said. He'd prefer to do something not as local. "I've come to believe that through serendipity something will open up when the time is right."

A possible bid for the General Assembly? At the suggestion he rolled his eyes, looked away, raised his eyebrows. "Maybe," he said. "The best thing I can do is express my interests."

Getting voters to see beyond his Arabic name would be a challenge in a campaign, he said.

"It can be done, and I think it's a good thing if it can. But it does require some education," he said.

Doing the right thing

In the meantime, ElSaffar is happy being the assessor. He doesn't enjoy property management, but he didn't ride the condo conversion wave, either, to sell off the properties. "I kinda don't believe in it," he said, acknowledging that he's not always the best businessman because his heart gets involved.

"I believe in affordable housing. I like rehabbing properties. I like doing things that are win-win."

He bought a building with money he inherited when his mother died. It wasn't in very good shape, but he wanted to rehab it. Not that he felt guilty about getting the money, he said, "but there are a lot of people in this world who will never inherit something like that. We've gotten something; we have some obligation to give back.

"It may not always be the best business thing to do, but it's what I believe in doing," he said.

Higher taxes affect him, too. He'll have to put more time in at his law practice this year to help pay his bills.

"You're not going to get rich being township assessor ... especially with the damn taxes in this town!"

CONTACT: dcarter@wjinc.com