Fayette mails out assessment notices
Culminating the two-year process of updating Fayette County’s real estate tax base, more than 80,000 official change of assessment notices were mailed to property owners Friday. The number includes new assessments for 78,000 taxable land parcels, as well as new mineral rights assessments on a smaller number of parcels. For consistency purposes, the mass mailing even includes new values on tax-exempt properties such as churches, even though they will remain tax-exempt.
With the mailings, Cole Layer Trumble, the firm that conducted Fayette’s first countywide reassessment since 1958, has bowed out of the process. Property owners who remain unsatisfied with their new values have until July 31 to file a formal appeal with the Fayette County Tax Assessment Appeals Board.
“The law requires us to mail the notices by July 1,” said James A. Hercik, CPE, the county’s chief assessor. “We wanted to give property owners the full 30 days to file an appeal if they choose to do so.”
Hercik said appeal forms are available by calling 724-434-5030, by downloading the form from the project’s Web site http://www.fayetteproperty.org or by visiting one of the county’s tax collectors, who have been supplied copies of the form.
There is no cost to appeal, unlike in some other counties were appellants must pay a fee.
Hercik said the county anticipates that 3,000 property owners will file formal appeals, a figure that’s roughly 10 times higher than the 300 to 400 that appeal in any other year. To handle the one-time crunch, the county commissioners have appointed four auxiliary appeals boards.
Those boards have been undergoing training to help them prepare for an appeals season that Hercik said is projected to run from July 29 through Oct. 31. The three-member auxiliary boards will operate alongside the regular three-member independent appeals board formed by Jim Killinger, Lloyd Moser and Joe Dorazio.
According to a press release from Patti Hall, information specialist for the revaluation project, approximately 7,500 property owners took advantage of the chance to hold informal meetings with CLT representatives after preliminary values were mailed out earlier this year.
CLT reported that 58 percent of those properties received value changes as a result of the informal meetings, said Hall.
However, that doesn’t prohibit any of those property owners – or anyone who did not request an informal meeting – from filing a formal appeal at this stage of the process.
Hercik said that since the new assessment system is based on year 2001 market values, appellants should be aware that although they can argue for a lower value on their land or their buildings, or both, at an appeal hearing, the board will focus on the property’s comprehensive market value.
“When you file (an appeal), you file against the total assessment,” said Hercik. “You can come in and argue (for example) that your land’s too high. You can present your case in that manner, but the board is still going to rule on the total assessment. They may agree with you on the land, but they may make some (upward) adjustment to the building.”
Likewise, appealing property owners aren’t prohibited from comparing their assessments to their neighbors. But the real litmus test for the appeals board will be the fair market value of the property, based on comparable recent sales.
“The board is to determine what’s the fair market value of your property. The only way to do that is to find out what other properties are selling for in your neighborhood,” said Hercik.
In a somewhat related matter, Hercik said his office has received “literally hundreds” of applications for enrollment in the Clean & Green program, which gives owners of more than 10 acres a preferential lower assessment in exchange for agreeing to certain restrictions on land development.
However, Hercik said none of those applications has been processed, as the county had to wait until the final valuation notices were mailed out before starting that process.