Real Estate Taxes

I wrote last October about the giant snafu we had with our real estate reassessment. Apparently, the company that did the work, and the county, are still going at it. Here is an excerpt from todays nice long article, that pertains to our house.

George Woodhouse, who served as BOE chairman, says the board was confronted with such a mess left behind by Blue Ridge that its members believed they had to start over in many instances to correct Blue Ridge's mistakes.

"We had to dig," Woodhouse said. "Basically we had to do their job."

Woodhouse explained that Blue Ridge failed in many cases to take into account depreciation of properties, especially along the Route 17 commercial corridor, and that many one-time residential properties that are now zoned commercial aren't marketable for commercial use.

"The lots are too small. They'd have to be stitched together with other lots to be of any use as commercial property. Those weren't realistic values," he said of the Blue Ridge assessments. He denied that the BOE overstepped its bounds in the process. They were not empowered to estimate values, he explained, only to apply factual information, such as square-footage, use, sales references and location, to the template Blue Ridge created to reach a value estimate.

So, now there trying to do it all over again.