Ruling in favor of Jackson County does not end fight over property values: ‘It’s not over’
Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. claimed victory this week in yet another court challenge of how his administration handled the 2023 property tax reassessment process, which stoked ongoing outrage among homeowners facing higher bills.
But despite its loss to White, the State Tax Commission is not giving up on trying to force Jackson County to lower property values, a commission spokesman says. There’s more court action to come.
“It’s not over, no,” tax commission chief counsel Gregory Allsberry told The Star Thursday.
Taxpayers should know, however, that whatever the outcome, it won’t absolve them of what they owe in taxes this year.
On Wednesday in Jackson County Circuit Court, Senior Judge Jacqueline Cook rejected the tax commission’s lawsuit requesting that she compel the county to follow a state order and roll back real estate values on nearly three fourths of the county’s 300,000 real estate parcels.
But her dismissal of that case was based on a technicality around the lawsuit and not the merits of the tax commission’s initial order to lower valuations, Allsberry said. The judge said the commission had no right to file its lawsuit requesting what’s called a writ of mandamus because the state had dropped an earlier lawsuit that made similar claims. And cases dismissed with prejudice, as that one was, cannot be refiled.
In short, she ruled that the state could not file the same type of lawsuit twice.
But Cook’s ruling did not address the central issue at the center of the legal dispute. That is the commission’s contention that the county’s reassessment process was unfair and did not comply with state inspection and notification requirements.
A separate lawsuit that is still underway could address that question more directly.
All properties whose assessment values go up by more than 15% must get a physical inspection by a county appraiser, and the commission contends the county didn’t do that uniformly.
“We think it’s significant that the court did not rule that the commission’s order regarding 2023 property tax assessments is invalid,” Allsberry said. “In other words, the commission’s order is still a valid order, despite Jackson County’s refusal to comply with it. And the commission is continuing to do everything within its power to enforce the order.”
That could mean appealing the judge’s ruling, he said. The commission argues that county officials had no legal standing to challenge its enforcement.
“The state tax commission has supervisory authority over county assessing officials, and it seems pretty clear to us that the law says that they just don’t have the right to challenge,” Allsberry said.
Taxpayers intervene
While they are not state employees, county assessors are under the supervision of the state, he said, and “an employee doesn’t have the right to challenge the boss’ order, to put it in terms people might understand.”
Jackson County begged to differ, when it sued the tax commission asking that the rollback order be nullified. That case is still pending before the same judge.
But there’s a twist. Last month, a private attorney unrelated to either party intervened in the case on behalf of county taxpayers who want to see the rollback order enforced, and their property tax bills lowered.
“We filed a counter claim seeking declaratory relief that the order is valid, and anything above 15% has to be brought back down,” said Jonathan Soper, a partner in the Independence law firm Humphrey Farrington & McClain.
The next hearing in that case is Monday. A trial date has not been set yet.
Jackson County claims in that lawsuit that its reassessment process in 2023 was lawful. The tax commission order, the county said, was unfair, based on falsehoods and motivated by partisan politics.
White and a majority of county legislators are Democrats. Whereas Republicans make up the majority on the State Tax Commission, and Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who represents the commission in court, is also a Republican.
White feels confident that the county will win that case, as it has other legal challenges it has faced since the 2019 reassessment. Residents widely criticized the county that year over rising valuations, but White and his administration insisted they were catching up to the market after years of undervaluing its properties. He maintains that the changes have made the county’s property tax system more fair.
“This outcome marks the latest in a series of legal victories as Jackson County works to correct longstanding issues in its property reassessment process,” his administration said in a written statement issued after Wednesday’s court ruling.
State law requires that real estate assessments for tax purposes reflect the actual market value of each property. Too often in the past, many properties were undervalued, White claims. That shifted the tax burden unfairly onto homeowners and businesses whose values were assessed correctly.
Commission promises scrutiny
But those reforms have cost White politically. Taxpayers have called for his removal from office after each biennial reassessment. This week The Star reported on the most recent effort to put a recall vote on the April ballot.
Shocked by spiking values and the fear that those hikes will lead to higher taxes, tens of thousands of taxpayers have filed appeals in each of the past three reassessment cycles. Many have claimed that assessment director Gail McCann Beatty has taken shortcuts in setting values by skipping physical inspections.
Bailey filed a lawsuit last December alleging that the county had not followed state law in conducting the 2023 reassessment. He then dropped the lawsuit in August, and the State Tax Commission issued its rollback order later that same day.
County officials contend that the state was on the verge of losing at trial when the tax commission issued its order.
But Bailey insisted that the lawsuit had served its purpose by unearthing information through the legal discovery process to support the commission’s order.
Whatever the outcome of the current litigation, Allsberry said the tax commission plans to closely monitor next year’s reassessment process, which is already underway.
“We are looking at our options for appealing the judge’s ruling, and in the meantime, we are going to do everything within our power to make sure that Jackson County’s assessing officials don’t commit the violations of state law in 2025 that they did during the 2023 reassessment cycle,” he said.
This story was originally published November 22, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
