Aug 14, 2005 3 min read

If Fayette County policymakers learned anything from the 45-year failure to implement a property reassessment, it should be the importance of regular updates. The lack of political will to do the right thing over four decades, coupled with public ignorance of the process, resulted in an unfair, broken system that lacked uniformity and was impossible to defend, morally or legally. In the most courageous act to come out of the commissioners’ office in a generation, Commissioners Vincent A. Vicites, Sean M. Cavanagh and Ronald M. Nehls in 2000 bit the proverbial bullet, authorizing a $3 million reassessment paid for by another visionary move, a $12 million bond issue. The work took two years to complete, but by 2003 new values went into effect – and more importantly, every property owner was graded using the same uniform system. That’s a far cry from the 1958, 1971, 1986 and who-knows-what other methods that floated around in the prior mishmash, where it seemed that shooting craps was the only procedure that wasn’t used to determine property values.

Built into the new, computer-based system was the ability to carry out periodic updates, which was part of the original plan as explained by the commissioners at that time. They weren’t keen on spending millions of bucks without the inclusion of a mechanism to keep the county from backsliding into its prior poor standing.

Although it seems like the reassessment just occurred yesterday, the time is fast approaching for the county to start authorizing money for an updated assessment. The work won’t be as labor-intensive as the 2003 project, according to chief assessor James A. Hercik, CPE, and most of it can be accomplished in-house, using his existing staff. But it’s imperative that the current county commissioners set money aside in the upcoming 2006 budget to begin this critical work, so the county can implement new and accurate values in 2008, creating a five-year update cycle.

It’s important to note one thing: This is not a Hercik initiative; it’s a follow-through of the original plan. The real estate market continues changing, on a yearly basis, and the county needs to keep abreast of those changes to continue making sure that property owners are paying their fair, proportional share of county, municipal and school district taxes.

The heavy lifting, in the form of raw data collection, was carried out in the 2003 assessment. This update would constitute a lighter workload, with assessors in most cases doing a drive-by of existing properties for a visual verification of existing data. The county would have to pay for some sales analysis to determine new values for neighborhoods.

And in a recommended tweaking of the current system, Hercik says his office is poised to carve out some new neighborhoods, rectifying one problem with the model implemented by Cole Layer Trumble in 2003. Some entire townships are currently classified as a single neighborhood, even though areas within them have wide-ranging real estate values.

The current commissioners – Vicites, Angela M. Zimmerlink and Joseph A. Hardy III – should put a portion of the total update cost, roughly estimated at between $500,000 and $1 million, in the 2006 budget when they start crafting it in a few months. That way work to keep Fayette on the right end of the state’s assessment accuracy list can begin in a timely fashion.