From the Lafayette Journal & Courier:
When Stuart Boehning receives his tax bill next month, it is sure to produce a grimace.
The Lafayette attorney, who owns Cascada Center at 3900 McCarty Lane, got a tax bill of $7,650.34 last year on the commercial and medical office building.
This year he expects his property tax bill to be upward of $200,000, the result of mistakes in how Tippecanoe County officials assessed the property during recent years.
“That’s an extreme hardship on the property owner,” said Boehning, who started construction on the building back in late 2008 when the property had an assessed value of $2,300. Now it is worth more than $2.8 million.
Assessing errors since 2008 didn’t take into account the property’s correct value, so Boehning has been paying about a tenth, or less, each year of what the county believes he owed.
Nearly $75,000 in property taxes are due this year. But officials will likely tack on top of that similar amounts owed for each of the prior two tax years.
A bill under consideration in the Indiana General Assembly offers an attempted fix for similar situations. The House bill, which first passed out of that chamber, cleared a Senate committee Tuesday.
An amendment approved Tuesday and authored by Sen. Brandt Hershman, R-Buck Creek, would hold property owners responsible for back taxes owed due to an assessment mistake but give them extra time to pay that bill, equal to “the number of years that the assessing officials took to make the correct assessment.”
Under the provision, property owners would have up to three years to pay the amount owed. An amendment proposed in February by Rep. Milo Smith, R-Columbus, would have forgiven such back taxes.
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See the full article here:
http://www.jconline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013303260033
