Do you know why the city proposals for Lakeside and Briarcliff are so economically feasible? Because they are all based upon faulty, wrong, completely irregular and untrue property assessments.
For two years (2011, 2012), the tax assessment office relied upon faulty software that they admitted gave them wrong numbers. They quietly calmed some areas that thought they were assessed far too low, like in Avondale Estates, but they never thought that wrong data for one place might mean wrong data everywhere.
They left it up to the individual appeals process to correct itself. Well, most people will fight to change something when it is costing them too much to ignore, but in hard times, if you cannot take the time off of work or afford an attorney, it must be pretty rare for anyone to actually fight in order to ask you to RAISE their value and associated tax payment.
I even wrote several blogs on this subject and Representative Scott Holcomb did as well.
Civic Duty: Appealing Your Property Tax Assessment
Appealing Your Property Tax: The Cell Tower Factor
Property Tax Assessments - Here We Go Again
So, the next year, you would think the county tax assessor would have worked hard to get things right again, but what did they do instead?? They used the SAME program, and got MORE faulty results. And, again, some estimates were over the top in terms of too high and there were many appeals to lower them.
But if you have some too high, yet a total that doesn't scream out "error" to your skilled staff, then the only possibility is that you have others, somewhere that must be far too low. So, where were the corrections to these faults? Why didn't we hear about the big changes after the appeals that would make it necessary for the rest of us to get new tax statements, possibly higher, to compensate for the ones that had to be lowered?
Now, in 2013, they say they ditched the bad software and are using something better that works. That's great, except you are still using the very BAD numbers. And, to compensate for the errors, the state has now placed limits on how quickly your home can appreciate from year to year, so even if the numbers are bad, there might not be a way to put the "right" ones in or else it could violate the law.
You may hear about feasibility studies, but don't believe what you read. Garbage in, garbage out.
