When the 2007 reassessment notices turned up in the mail, many Jackson County property owners were pleased, on one hand, to notice a dramatic increase in the estimated market value of their homes.
On reflection, however, those same homeowners felt a twinge of anxiety over what the revised valuation might mean for their annual tax bill.
A journalist is obliged to make clear any personal interest in the matter about which he or she is writing. I do confess to having such an interest, although mine is no different from that of any other resident.
The notice from the county indicated that assessed value of some homes — amounting to about a fifth of their market value — had gone up 50 percent or more in a year.
But only through a further calculation — requiring precise knowledge of the tax levy, information that most citizens do not have readily at hand — is it possible to determine the actual dollar amount of the resulting tax.
County appraisers came to their estimates of home values well before the national mortgage crisis sent the real estate market into a tailspin.
Homeowners paying directly to the county got the bad news when they received their tax bills, payable by the end of the reassessment year.
For many, if not most of us, however, property taxes are billed to the financial institutions holding the mortgages on our homes, and are paid out of escrow accounts accumulated through additions to our house payments.
So not until early 2008, when notice was received from the mortgage company of an increase that might amount to as much as a 40 percent hike in the monthly escrow payment for taxes, was there a clear sense of the reassessment’s impact.
By then, the opportunity for an informal hearing to challenge the estimated market value was long past.
Some homeowners, though surprised and dismayed, can handle the unforeseen increase. But there are certain to be others who cannot, for whom the burden could be as ruinous as the mortgage crisis that has shattered dreams and put families on the street.
In the final hours of the Missouri legislature’s 2008 session, a bill mandating reassessment reform was passed by a wide margin and signed by the governor. Among its provisions is expanded relief for certain low-income, aged and other especially challenged property owners. But two of its principal features bear directly on the issue at hand.
One, effective with the next reassessment in 2009, will require all taxing jurisdictions to reduce levies to make increases in property value “revenue-neutral,” preventing taxing authorities from reaping a windfall at public expense.
“Only by a public vote do taxing entities have a right to increase taxes,” Republican Sen. Michael Gibbons of Kirkwood, the Senate sponsor of the bill, declared during a conversation in Kansas City last month.
“The purpose of reassessment,” he said, “is to preserve equity in valuation among property owners. It was never intended to be a back-door tax increase.”
Another provision would require that all homeowners — escrow payers as well as direct payers — be given a prompt estimate of the tax consequences of the new assessed value, allowing a timely start on mounting an appeal.
Although Jackson County already honors a levy rollback requirement, its effect in some cases results in only a slight easing of the tax bill.
Part of that, county Assessor Curtis Koons explained, is because the rollback is based on a countywide calculation. Precipitous value declines in some distressed neighborhoods can more than offset rising values in others, making the overall result negligible.
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