June 4, 2007
Property Tax Reassessments
Often, lawmakers call for blanket reassessments for a whole community costing millions of dollars. These reassessments usually result in many appeals due to faulty measurements and data collection irregularities and do nothing to change the tax base. Reassessments are a political shell game and I suspect, many times, they result in large kickbacks from the huge windfall from the assessment company.
If the building department and property tax department are doing the job they are paid for, reassessments are not necessary. Blanket reassessments do nothing except fleece the taxpayer. An occasional outbuilding, deck or pool that escaped notice does in no way justifies the huge expense of a blanket reassessment. That expense can never be recouped and leave the taxpayer, again, holding the bag.
Filed under Reassessments by admin
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Comments on Property Tax Reassessments »
J. Keen Holland @ 2:42 pm
The move to state-mandated periodic reassessments (five years is a common interval) was a response to the very real unfairness of a system (if you can call it that) of spot assessments. As so often happens with government activities, you cannot look at arguments about efficiency without considering fairness.
Under spot assessments, homeowners were discouraged from making substantial improvements to their properties by fear that doing so (usually through the mechanism of applying for a building permit) would trigger a reassessment of their property and increase their tax bills. Spot assessment also tended to shift the tax burden in favor of homes which had not changed hands or been improved for many years and against new construction.