Platte County officials can’t explain home value drop. Now owners face increase

Platte County homeowners will see their assessed property values — used to determine how much they owe in property taxes — increase by nearly 7% compared to what they were last year due to an agreement the county and the Missouri State Tax Commission reached last week.

The deal followed weeks of contentious debate among local and state leaders after the state had ordered the county to increase every homeowner’s 2025 property valuation by 15%. State officials said the order was in response to the county allegedly low-balling assessments for years and then this year reporting an overall drop in property values instead of an increase.

Platte County commissioners are describing the agreement to raise everyone’s valuations as a “clear victory” for homeowners over the state agency. In a statement, commissioners said the 7% increase more accurately reflects the rate home sale prices have increased in the county in the last few years: about 7.75% per year from 2019 to 2024.

“What we were faced with was 15% and the county commission was able to negotiate that down to 6.835% which, you know, some people may be concerned about that, but, you know, 6.835 is a lot better than 15,” said Brian Whitley a Parkville alderman representing Ward 2. “There’s no way that it was going to be zero. So, you know, I think people need to be realistic about expectations on that.”

However, questions still remain about what exactly led to the showdown between the county and the state, and if Platte County is handling assessments fairly.

Neither state nor county officials have been able to explain a significant drop in reported residential property values in the county this year, which is what state officials say prompted them to intervene and require everyone’s assessments to increase across the board.

Why is Missouri getting involved in Platte County’s taxes?

The state of Missouri, like many states, has laws about how property values should be determined to help make sure that taxes can be collected in a uniform and accurate way.

Missouri law requires counties to assess the value of a property as close to its market value as possible, so that it can be taxed based on a value similar to what it could be sold for. Since the housing market is always in flux, the law has a bit of wiggle room and specifies that assessed values should fall within the range of 90-110% of market value.

Platte County has been undervaluing its residential properties in recent years, according to a study by the State Tax Commission, assessing them significantly under market value.

State data showed that in 2023 and 2024, Platte County was assessing residential properties at about 81% of their market value — 9% under what is required by law.

It’s this trend of too-low home valuations that caused the State Tax Commission to start to scrutinize Platte County’s assessments.

Superintendents of area school districts had also been reaching out to the State Tax Commission concerned about how too-low assessments would affect their schools’ budgets, which are largely funded by property taxes.

County didn’t follow state advice

The State Tax Commission recommended to Platte County earlier this year that it increase residential property values around 8-10% higher than their 2024 assessed values.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead of increasing residential property values by 8-10% as advised, this year Platte County Assessor David Cox said he kept property values the same as last year. In a recently published online letter, Cox said he “chose to leave values unchanged.” An informal review of a random sample of several Platte County residential property valuations showed no change in assessed values from 2024 to 2025.

However, that’s not the whole story, at least according to data that the Platte County assessment office submitted to the State Tax Commission.

That data shows that residential property values neither increased by 8-10% like the state recommended, nor remained completely the same as in 2024, like the assessor said.

Instead, the county reported to the state that residential property values actually dropped overall since last year, by 7.1%.

And neither state nor county officials have been able to explain whose property values dropped enough to bring down the county’s overall value so significantly.

This unexplained decrease in residential assessment values this year is why the State Tax Commission said it needed to intervene to order all Platte County homeowners’ valuations to increase.

The state agency ordered the county to increase all residential assessments by 15% more than what they were assessed at this year, which would have accounted for the 8% increase the agency had initially suggested and the 7% decrease the county reported.

The deal the county and state agreed on instead requires home valuations to increase based on the 2024 values, in effect voiding out the county’s initial round of 2025 residential assessments.

A mysterious decrease

The State Tax Commission’s chief counsel Gregory Allsberry told The Star that Cox submitted what’s called a Form 11 — as required of every assessor in Missouri by the end of July in odd-numbered years — that showed an average decrease of over 7% in residential property values since 2024, not a 0% change as Cox had said.

“We don’t really know how he did that because if he simply did nothing, then the assessments would have stayed at exactly the same level. They wouldn’t have gone down,” Allsberry said in an interview.

For this reason, the State Tax Commission “had no choice but to step in and take corrective action, as required by law,” Allsberry said in a statement to The Star.

But despite the data the assessor submitted to the state, Platte County Presiding Commissioner Scott Fricker denied that assessed residential property values decreased in the county this year.

“I have never seen a decrease in valuations from one year to the next,” Fricker said. “I don’t know where they’re coming up with that, frankly.”

Neither he nor officials with the State Tax Commission fully understand where the reported 7% decrease came from. They told The Star that more data is needed to explain why.

Platte County Assessor Elect Marcus Farr questioned the state’s calculation.

“Our numbers are not the same as what theirs are,” Farr said. “I don’t know what they’re applying to get that number. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Way more new construction?

A dramatic increase in new construction that the county reported to the state could be one possible explanation for the overall decrease in property values, but it doesn’t explain which properties’ values decreased.

Platte County’s assessment data that it submits to the state each year shows a massive increase in the value of new residential construction in 2025 — more than four times what it’s been in each of the last five years.

This year, the county reported $191 million of new construction to the state. In contrast, from 2022 to 2024, the county reported new residential development valued around $30 to $45 million a year.

That drastic jump in the value of new construction has a big effect on the equation the state uses to determine the overall change in assessed value and could be part of the reason that it calculated a 7% decrease in residential values overall.

State Tax Commission officials said they don’t have the data yet to show what specific residential construction caused this dramatic increase.

Still — regardless of where the $191 million in new construction came from — the calculation means that what should be the same amount of property the county assessed in 2024 was assessed at a lower value in 2025, which suggests a significant decrease in some property valuations that no officials have been able to explain.

Larry Jones, a manager with the State Tax Commission who completed Platte County’s Form 11, said the county hasn’t yet provided data on each individual property’s valuations, which is needed to answer this question.

Cox, Platte County’s assessor, has not responded to calls or emails from The Star.

The Star has requested the county’s database of individual property valuations.

Taking issue with a flat increase

Even though county officials are touting the agreement reached last week to increase valuations by about 7% as a victory, the move was still clouded by concerns.

The county’s statement said the flat increase came from “arbitrary valuations” from the state that evaded “the traditional data-driven assessment” to reflect individual property value increases.

In its statement to The Star, the State Tax Commission said it “followed the same methodology that it has followed for many years for all counties in the State” and used data provided by Platte County to make its determinations of an appropriate assessed value.

Fricker told The Star that he thinks property tax reform is needed to prevent statewide agencies from overriding local tax structures and protect against the issues that come with a flat valuation increase.

“When you apply an across the board increase, you are essentially transferring wealth from the working class to the wealthy class because the homes of the wealthy, their values go up a lot faster than the working class,” Fricker said. “It just isn’t fair.”

Changes to property valuations don’t correspond exactly with changes to property taxes, so just because homeowners’ assessment values will go up does not necessarily mean their property taxes will.

Taxing jurisdictions like school districts, cities and libraries will factor in the new 7% increase on residential property values when setting their tax rates next month.

The Star’s Kacen Bayless contributed reporting.

This story was originally published August 25, 2025 at 12:57 PM.