Okay, it happens. I was wrong. It wan’t that I was misled or that I got the wrong answer. The answer I received was right, I just asked the wrong question.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that if the Concord City Council would just vote to not accept annual appraisals then this years appraisal would revert to last years. Here’s what actually happens. The tax bills we all received are for values as of April 2012. The vote for annual appraisals that the council will take at their May meeting is for next years taxes. And next years taxes will be based on real estate values as of April 2013.
The director of the Department of Revenue Administration explained it this way; the vote for annual assessments is alway forward looking. Meaning that they have already approved the annual assessment for the current year last year.
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At the city council’s last meeting, I asked what is to be done to rectify this years problems and what will be done to insure we won’t see this type of problem in the future. Of the answers I received, none were satisfactory. Property owners can ask for an abatement from the city. If that fails they can appeal to the New Hampshire Board of Tax and Land Appeals or the Superior Court.
The best hope is that a property owner can convince the city that a mistake was made in assessing their property. Usually this is due to incorrect information. However it is difficult to receive an abatement from the city if the information they based the valuation on is correct but you are contesting the value assigned to your property. If the city denies your request for an abatement then you can either appeal to the NH Board of Tax and Land Appeals or at the Superior Court. Both these options take time and money.
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It appears many commercial properties were overvalued, based on a very small sampling of information the city used to set commercial property values. Let’s hope the city is not only willing to take into account factual errors, but also the fact that the valuation may be flawed because of the small sampling of information and how that information was applied to the larger commercial market.
It will be most unfortunate if those whose properties were overvalued are forced to wait years to have their cases heard while having to pay the higher property values from this years assessment. And it will be truly unfortunate if our city isn’t able to find a fix for this problem so that it doesn’t occur next year.
