Taxing times ahead for returning county assessor

By Dan MacArthur
North Forty News

With property tax bills arriving as New Year's resolutions relapse, work is well under way on the looming reappraisals that will determine the magnitude of taxes for the next two years.

"I have a short fuse on this reappraisal," acknowledged Larimer County Assessor Steve Miller, noting that the notices of assessed valuation must be in the mail by May 1. In the next three months, Miller said, he and his staff will be developing new formulas to more equitably value the thousands of properties in the county.

Miller said his office is taking steps to ensure the process will work more smoothly. He hopes to avoid the record numbers of appeals in the last two reappraisals that proved the pivotal issue in the county's premier election battle that returned him to the position he was forced from by term limits four years ago.

Miller said he plans to accomplish that by looking deeper into the past to establish property values and making more information available to taxpayers.

In developing new property values, Miller said, his office this year will consider sales during the last four years rather than the traditional 18 months. Foreclosures also will be taken into consideration, he said. In doing so, Miller expects to balance out the extremes in values, particularly since the real estate market started cooling.

"We're in a settling market, so we can't use one time frame," he said.

Miller pledged to make more information available on the assessor's web site. He also wants to organize what he termed an "assessor posse" composed of citizens from across the county. Miller said the posse would ride herd on the valuation process, reviewing notices of valuation before they are mailed, to identify any disparities and get information out to their neighbors.

"If the issue is information, the more information we can push, the better," he said.

Regardless of all those efforts, Miller said, there are no guarantees that the number of appeals will decline. "My position is not to have no protests," he said. "My responsibility is to develop a tax roll that is clean."

Miller said it is hoped that taxpayers will find their property values plausible and believe that "things will be better now that Steve Miller's back in town." He realizes, however, the reaction may not be so enthusiastic.

"I think we're going to get a lot of hard questions," Miller said. "This is a tough market."

In addition to those hard questions, Miller said, those legions of taxpayers who lost trust in the assessor's office have become accustomed to appealing to determine the factors that went into valuing their property. He said that practice may continue even though he plans to make those neighborhood comparables used for valuation available on the web site.

With the soft residential real estate market, Miller said, he expects few significant increases in home values. But, he said, that certainly won't be the case with commercial properties, which pay 3.5 times the residential tax rate.

"The commercial market has continued to be pretty good," Miller said, attributing the trend to purchases by out-of-town investors. "Commercial is going to see an increase."