Voicing displeasure with the results of the recent property reassessment, the Essex County Supervisors last week agreed to host a “town hall meeting” allowing the public to better understand the process of the mass appraisal.
A mass appraisal is a method for valuing a group of properties using standardized procedures and statistical analysis.
Vision Government Solutions completed the reassessment in which Essex real estate values increased by an average of 47 percent.
Reassessment is the process by which the assessed value of real estate property held by citizens, businesses, and industries in a county is revised to reflect fair market value.
General reassessments of real estate take place every four years. However, any county that has a total population of 50,000 or less may elect by majority vote of its board of supervisors to conduct its general reassessments at either five-year or six-year intervals.
Essex County’s last reassessment was completed in 2021 by BrightMinds.
Brian Cunningham of Vision Government Solutions explained via phone that the new figures were the result of a review of Essex land sales over the previous year, including some from 2023.
“We look at the total values of the properties that were sold,” he told the supervisors. “The values are based on sales ratios.”
South District Supervisor Ronnie Gill said he was surprised at the jump that improvement values experienced.
“It seems to me the process of valuing improvements has been on the high-end,” Gill remarked. “To me, some of these are just plain wrong. The improvements have not been studied in detail.”
Gill reported that he heard from landowners whose property values skyrocketed, “And those houses don’t even have electricity hooked up to them.”
Cunningham described out-building values as “being all over the place” and an attempt was made to equalize those figures. “We tried to soften the blow on the change of value of those out-buildings,” he said.
“Why would improvement values go up at a higher rate than land values,” Board Chairman Rob Akers asked. “Your land isn’t going away but your house could depreciate.”
“We tried to do this as a data driven process,” Cunningham explained. He said values spiked as the “sales market is going through the roof.”
“Is it possible that values were undervalued in 2021 and now we’re getting a double whammy here?” North District Supervisor John Magruder asked. He said two, adjacent five acre lots both with no improvements have different values.
“There’s several reasons… possibly one was undervalued and the other was overvalued and hopefully now they have fair market values,” Cunningham responded.
“What this is getting down to with the wide variety of assessments on different lands with some people’s values going up 20 percent and some others 100 percent, it forces the taxpayer to fight here,” Magruder said. “If this stuff wasn’t right when it was sent out I don’t think it’s right to have our citizens bear the brunt of the right to correct it if there’s something else out there that is not correct.”
Akers told Cunningham his 30-year-old residence is valued higher per square foot than a neighboring new home.
“Something is not right,” Akers added. “The assessment notices should have never gone out with those kind of errors in them. You should have caught that, scrubbed this information, and cleaned up the laundry before it went out.”
Akers assured the public that the matter would be corrected.
“We are looking into this and we’re going to make it right,” he said. “We saw it the first time you did. I’m hearing (increases of) 75, 80 or 100 percent. I’ve had yet to hear from anyone who said their’s went up 40 percent.”
“It’s essential to me to know the reasons that we have the increases,” North District Supervisor Sidney Johnson said. “I can only speculate to my constituents and speculation doesn’t help when money is coming out of their pockets.”
Eventually, Cunningham told the supervisors that about 270-290 sales were reviewed to establish the new values. He said an ideal sample size would be 1,000 sales.
“We’re a good way from that,” Gill responded.
“It’s a small sample size, but that’s what we’ve got to work with,” Cunningham said. “Ultimately, the sales ratio we have to sign off on…the confidence level in that is very high.”
“I think it would behoove us to further investigate this to get a better understanding,” Magruder suggested. “I’m not happy or satisfied with these large swings in increases.”
“We need to have a town hall meeting with Vision on site and with our Commissioner of the Revenue,” Akers suggested.
The supervisors agreed to hold the town hall meeting the first week in February at the Essex High School auditorium. The meeting is scheduled to take place Wednesday, February 5, at 5:30 p.m.
Meanwhile, during the supervisors’ public comment period, Kevin Perrigan noted his property value jumped 63.63 percent and he scheduled a meeting with the appraisal firm.
“I was told there was an error in the computer system,” Perrigan said. “If we hadn’t stood up to check, no one would know that was the problem. They’re assuming in doing this. They should be doing the job they were hired to do and doing it properly. I don’t recall anytime in the past where we’ve had an assessment problem.”
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