The Marion County assessor will delay mailing new property-assessment notices until mid-December because of a calculating error affecting potentially 5,000 homeowners.
Those new values, resulting from the first wholesale reassessment of Marion County property in a decade, will play a key role in determining how much homeowners will pay toward next year’s property tax bills.
Assessor Joe O’Connor says as many as 5,000 homes are in neighborhoods scattered around Marion County where the error may have led assessors to overinflate values by an average of 20 percent. The mistake involved a failure to factor in recent home sales data for those areas.
..
O’Connor attributed the lapse to a lack of enough home sales since 2010 in some areas to establish sales trends.
The official said that what didn’t happen — but now will — was for assessors to take a broader look at nearby streets and neighborhoods to come up with a sales data factor, one that likely would reduce the final assessment value.
Since the problem was caught before reassessment notices were set to go out, in mid-November, O’Connor said he doesn’t expect the delay to affect the mailing of tax bills — with correct amounts due — next spring.
...
Also Monday, a state senator who represents parts of the Northside called for state regulators and a state legislative committee to examine the issue.
State Sen. Scott Schneider, a Republican running for re-election in District 30, which includes Meridian-Kessler and Butler-Tarkington, said residents in those neighborhoods “are fired up and rightly so.” “They believe that this is all starting to happen again.”
He is asking the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance, which already has certified Marion County’s reassessment, to review the data and tables used in the county’s formulas.
And Schneider says the legislature’s joint Commission
on State Tax and Financing Policy has agreed to take up the inflated assessments at a meeting later this year.In particular, he said, he wants the commission to determine whether the reassessment process was being used to manipulate or circumvent tax caps. An increase in a property’s assessed value also increases the property tax allowed under the cap.
...
Overall, the countywide reassessment increased property values across Marion County by 1.07 percent, O’Connor said.
But residential properties’ values increased an average 2.28 percent, according to a spreadsheet provided by the assessor, while commercial assessments decreased an average 2.41 percent.
Residential assessments in Washington Township (up 6 percent) and Warren Township (up nearly 4.8 percent) had the largest average increases. Wayne, Pike and Perry townships saw overall declines in assessed residential property values.
See the full story here:
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012121015026
