From the Lafayette Journal & Courier:
We spend enough time picking apart the General Assembly when lawmakers make a mess of things by overreaching or misreading or just blundering.
So it’s good to see lawmakers looking for the right sort of compromise when oversight by government slips and taxpayers are on the hook.
Last week, an Indiana Senate panel considered a measure stemming from a case in Tippecanoe County, in which a Lafayette developer was hit by the promise of a tax bill approaching $200,000. The bill was meant to catch up with delays in updated assessments as his property went from bare ground to a $2 million-plus holding.
When the county assessor caught up with the increased value of Cascada Center on McCarty Lane, property taxes went from $7,650 a year to nearly $75,000 a year. What’s more, the county was looking to claw into previous years to extract what should have been owed in the time when improvements were made to the time the county had those improvements properly marked in the books.
The Statehouse role in all of this?
An amendment for a property tax bill being heard in the Senate would have forgiven those retroactive charges. That would have served Cascada Center perfectly. But it wasn’t a solution that was greeted kindly in a Senate committee.
Sen. Brandt Hershman, R-Buck Creek, came up with what has to be considered a fair solution for a frustrating situation: The property owner should be given time, equal to the number of years the assessing mistake went on, to catch up with what is owed the county.
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http://www.jconline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013303310015
