Central - Sunday, July 20, 2008 23:38 - 0 Comments

Many Ada County property owners get a break

More than 1,000 property owners in southwestern Idaho’s highly populated Ada County have asked for a reduction in assessed property value in an attempt to lower their property taxes.

County officials said that most of them got some type of reduction following 13 days of property tax assessment appeals that concluded last week.

“We’re in a time when people will fight down to that last $1,000,” Ada County Commissioner Fred Tilman told the Idaho Statesman.

Asking for a break were 1,103 taxpayers on almost 3,000 properties, using a process that has county commissioners and assessors considering their arguments.

More than half of the 1,103 requests asked that their cases be considered without a formal hearing, and county officials said most of those were granted value reductions.

Besides those cases, 456 property owners asked for a formal hearing. Of those, 14 percent of the property owners met with appraisers and reached an agreement before the hearing.

Another 31 percent failed to reach an agreement before the hearing but succeeded in getting lower property appraisals when county commissioners agreed with them.

The remaining 55 percent saw their property assessments upheld by the commissioners. But even some of them likely received a reduction by making agreements with the assessor before the hearing, settling on a revised amount. That revised amount, or compromise value, was then designated by commissioners as “upheld,” even though it could have been a reduction from the original valuation of the property.

Exact numbers are not available, officials said, because Ada County doesn’t track the percentages of reductions or increases in a given year.

Tilman noted that, in general, property owners did not get as large a reduction in valuation as they had hoped.

Commissioners said that many of the requests for reductions came from developers caught in a real estate market slump, with some appealing hundreds of valuations of parcels of empty land.

Another curve ball in the process is that property owners saw the market value of their property fall after having already received their assessments.

However, state law makes Jan. 1 of each year the date for which assessors determine property value.

“It’s important for fairness to have a benchmark because real estate markets are different according to the part of the state you live in,” said Rich Wright, a spokesman for Ada County. “Jan. 1 is the true snapshot.”

In another sign of the slow down in real estate, the median increase in assessed property value in the county was less than 1 percent.

That compares to a nearly 17 percent increase in 2007.