Jackson County tax reassessment favored whites over minorities, ACLU lawsuit claims
On behalf of four predominantly minority Kansas City neighborhoods, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against Jackson County and its assessor, claiming that the 2019 real estate reassessment process favored predominantly white areas over areas where residents were African-American or Hispanic.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Jackson County Circuit Court, claims assessment department director Gail McCann Beatty violated the federal Fair Housing Act and those actions should be corrected.
The litigation stems from Beatty’s decision to cap increased assessments at 14.9 percent in some neighborhoods, but not others. State law requires that assessors perform physical inspections of homes and business buildings when their values go up 15 percent of more.
One-third of Jackson County property parcels fit that description when assessment notices went out in late May, with some doubling or even quadrupling in value, likely leading to a much higher tax bill.
But many other properties — 28 percent of the total, the suit alleges — should also have been assessed at 15 percent or more. But Beatty ran out of time to even do desktop inspections by consulting photos on Google Street View and so decided to cap those increases at 14.9 percent until the 2021 reassessment cycle.
Beatty, who is African-American, has said that it was “a coincidence of the process” that mostly-white neighborhoods were more likely to benefit from the cap than areas where most of the homeowners are minorities.
The lawsuit alleges that the assessment department should have been able to tell that the policy would have a discriminatory effect had Beatty done more analysis.
“Because of the unprecedented and excessive increase in property taxes now faced by many Black and Hispanic residents of Jackson County,” the suit says, “it is likely that some will not be able to pay their taxes and will therefore face either bank or tax foreclosure of their properties.”
Taxes are due Dec. 31. The Board of Equalization has reduced the assessed valuations on many properties whose owners have protested the market values set by Beatty’s department. The board won’t finish hearing all 18,000 appeals until next year.
The four plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit include the Westside Neighborhood Association, Vineyard Neighborhood Association, Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council and the Washington Wheatley Neighborhood Improvement Association.
Jackson County does not as a matter of policy comment on pending litigation.
This story was originally published December 19, 2019 at 12:29 PM.
