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Quaker Valley Changes Appeal Standard

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We’ve written a bit about appeals led by governing bodies recently (here, here, and here) and noted that if the state is not going to be willing to mandate a regular cycle of reassessment for counties to follow then what is left is taxing bodies establishing standards to appeal values they feel are too low.  Said another way by a member of the Quaker Valley school board “It falls to school districts to maintain equitability through the appeals process more or less by default”.

Quaker Valley just changed how it will appeal properties they feel are out of whack with assessments: by looking at sales prices, they previously would take the price and the assessment and if there was a resulting loss of $1,000 in tax revenue, the value would be appealed.  Now the resulting loss would have to be $1,500, which will result in 21 homes that would have been appealed not going through the process.  Good news for them, not so much for the ones that did not make the cut.

At current district millage rate (17.1548 mills) a home that sold at $350,000 would produce $6,004 in school taxes if assessed at sale price.  Under the old standard of a $1,000 difference, that home would have to be assessed at $291,000 or less to be appealed.  Now under the standard of a $1,500 difference, the home would have to be assessed at $262,000 or less to be reviewed.  That changes the assessed/sale ratio from 83% to 74%, but how you view the change would likely depend on if you bought the house and the assessment was $265,000 or $259,000.

The $265,000 assessment would produce $4,546 at the current millage rate: compared to what the house would produce if assessed at its sale price ($6,004), the difference would be $1,457–under the $1,500 standard and not appealed.  The $259,000 would produce $4,443, or $1,560 less than the assessment at sale price, and would likely receive an appeal notice and possibly could see taxes hiked.

 

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Allegheny Institute
Allegheny Institute

The Allegheny Institute is a non-profit research and education organization. Our mission is to defend the interests of taxpayers, citizens and businesses against an increasingly burdensome and intrusive government.

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