Thursday, September 5, 2013

Indiana Public Media Reports Bartholomew County Working Through 2000 Property Tax Appeals

From the Indiana Public Media:

The recently passed legislation that mandates property be assessed on a four year cycle will likely reduce the amount of appeals seen after future assessments.

Bartholomew County officials say they have settled about half of the property tax appeals they received during 2012 reassessments.

As we reported in April,  this year’s property tax assessment was the first one in Bartholomew County since 2002. That meant a lot of people saw big increases in their bill. More than 2,000 people appealed and Bartholomew County Assessor Lew Wilson says the county still has about half those to go through.

“We’ve so far got almost a 95 percent rate of settling what we call informally without the people having to go to the property tax board,” he says.

Wilson says he expects the assessor’s office to settle most of the remaining appeals in the next three months, but says there will be a few cases that will require much more time.

Indiana recently passed legislation that mandates property be assessed on a four year cycle.  After wading through hundreds of appeals and with many more to go, Wilson says he was excited when the legislation passed.

“The four-year actual rotation that they’re going to start doing now is going to make for, I think, much better assessments. More quality, more accuracy” he says.

The next reassessment is in 2014 and will start property assessment in Indiana on the four year cycle.

http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/bartholomew-county-assesor-working-appeals-55119/