From the Terre Haute Tribune Star:
The Vigo County Assessor’s office has come under criticism in the past several months for the timeliness of its reports to the State of Indiana.
Mayor Duke Bennett has publicly said that delayed approval from Indianapolis of the county’s annual budgets — at least partially a result of tardy assessment information — makes his job more difficult. That’s because the city can’t know for certain what its budget will be in a given year until the county’s overall budget gets state approval.
In Indiana, the first step in local government budgeting is assessing property in a county. That’s because property taxes – which are based on assessed value – provide a large portion of the funding for local governments. Assessors must put a dollar value on every land parcel in the county – more than 60,000 in the case of Vigo County. It’s a job that must be done each year. If it takes extra time, the county’s final budget approval could be delayed.
“The entire property tax system relies on the actions of several offices to ensure it runs smoothly,” said Jenny Banks, director of communications for the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance, which oversees the budgets of all 92 of Indiana’s counties. “When a delay occurs at any time in the process, this can create a domino effect on the remaining actions that must occur.”
The county assessor — using mind-numbing facts and figures such as cost tables, depreciation tables, recent arms-length sales disclosures, trending and so on — is responsible for calculating gross assessed value in the county. A first big step in that process is to develop a “ratio study,” which is based on assessed values compared with actual sales during a specific 14-month period. There are generally thousands of such sales to examine.
Vigo County has been among the last of Indiana’s counties to submit ratio studies in the past few years, a point not lost on Mayor Bennett, who believes that lateness has delayed final approval of the city’s budget each year by the Department of Local Government Finance.
“It does make it difficult for us to budget,” Bennett said in telephone interview with the Tribune-Star on Thursday. “It would be great if we could get the data sooner.”
Racing against time
According to emails from the DLGF to the City of Terre Haute, obtained through a public records request, Vigo County was the 89th of 92 counties to submit a ratio study to the state in 2013 and 90th in 2012.
The City of Terre Haute’s 2012 budget was not approved by the state until March 21 of that year — nearly four months into the budget year. The city’s 2013 budget was approved March 12.
When budgets are approved so late in the year, it requires the City to make changes in its actual spending plans, Bennett said. Last year, for example, city officials learned in March they needed to cut about $1 million from their proposed budget.
The State of Indiana recommends county assessors turn in their ratio studies each year by May 1 — a date few counties meet. In 2012, for example, only 15 of 92 counties had submitted ratio studies three weeks after the deadline had passed.
Many factors influence when a county can complete its ratio study, said Debbie Lewis, Vigo County assessor. As recently as 2010, (for the 2011 budget year) Vigo County was able to complete its ratio study by June 9, making it among the earliest in the state. The following year it was completed in August and in the next year not until October.
For the 2014 budget year, Lewis submitted Vigo’s ratio study on Sept. 9 — more than five weeks earlier than the pervious year. This year, working on figures for Vigo County’s 2015 budgets, is going better still.
“We are well in advance of where we were last year,” Lewis said, adding her target date this year is to be not later than July. “Baring a catastrophe, we ought to be able to make that.”
...
See the full article here:
http://www.tribstar.com/local/x493451467/Tardy-assessments-hamper-local-budgetss
