Newspapers routinely devote ink to stories about property tax increases and property tax reform, but sometimes overlook the question of whether properties are correctly and fairly valued for taxation. Often they are not, and you can prove it using the databases of tax assessments maintained by county governments in any state. In Pennsylvania, counties aren't required to update property values, and they routinely go decades without a reassessment. As a result, properties carry tax assessments bearing little relation to their relative value. (See Richard Dalton's story on page one) Even in states like Ohio that do require regular reassessments of property values, there can be wide disparities, as The Columbus Dispatch reported in two-day series in March. In the two counties I have examined in Pennsylvania, people who owned similar homes purchased for similar amounts often had substantially different assessments, meaning they were effectively paying different tax rates.
The database gave us the facts, but also gave us the names of property owners, whose comments helped tell the story.
I was part of a reporting team at The Scranton Times that analyzed tax assessments in Lackawanna County in 1997. We found so many examples of assessments that were clearly uneven and unfair that it was hard to decide which ones to use.
Waiting to be told
In county after county throughout the United States, the same stories are waiting to be told. The databases can expose serious flaws that go to the heart of local systems of taxation, and even when they don't, they are tremendous resources.
The databases typically show who owns every property in a county, what they pay in taxes, when they bought the property, and what they paid for it, the mailing address of the property owner, information on tax-exempt properties, and more.
At The Scranton Times we used Microsoft Access and Excel to search and sort Lackawanna County's database. Most of our useful information came from comparing purchase prices of recently sold properties to tax assessments that were in many cases set in the 1960s, and from researching properties with unusually high or low assessments. The database gave us the facts, but also gave us the names of property owners, whose comments helped tell the story. Most of the people interviewed had no idea their properties were over- or under assessed, due to their confusion about assessments, mileage rates and taxes. We also used the database to check out tips about people whose homes weren't taxed at all, like the brother of a local tax collector. And we found countless properties that were over- or under assessed due to mistakes or deliberate policies of the county assessor's office. I'm now with The Morning Call, where I'm part of a team covering Carbon County's first tax reassessment in 31 years. Among other things, we'll be using assessment databases from before, during and after the reassessment to track the winners and losers as the property tax burden shifts.
What to expect
Here are some things you might encounter if you decide to do a tax assessment database project: Counties to overcharge for the data.
We'll also look at the flaws in the previous system, which are similar to the problems in Lackawanna County, but we won't be focusing on them because more than 600 property owners already demonstrated that the system was beyond repair and convinced a judge to order the reassessment.
The assessment series that ran in The Scranton Times can be found at www.nepanews.com/stories/Tax%20assesment/taxseries.htm
Coverage of Carbon County's reassessment can be found on The Morning Call's Web site, www.mcall.com.
The Scranton Times bought Lackawanna County's database on nine-track tape for $200. The Morning Call, after initially being asked to pay about $1,500 for a 46,000-record database in Carbon County, paid $250 after threatening to sue over the cost.
Dirty data. In counties that haven't reassessed for 30 years, much of the information in the database will have been typed in from decades-old paper files. In the assessment databases I've worked with the name and street address fields were incomplete and full of misspellings, and other fields, such as purchase price and property size, were often blank.
Regardless of appeals, it's worth checking the assessments of local big businesses and politicians.
The good news is that properties are typically identified by a unique number, like a social security number for properties, that ties each record to a map location and property record.
The need to check paper files. Plan to check the county's paper files on each individual property you plan to write about. Between the time you request the data and the time you report on it, assessments and property owners can change. Also, the paper records often contained more information than the electronic ones. Lackawanna County's paper records included handwritten notes. My favorite paper record in Lackawanna County was an assessor's card noting that a house had a low, reduced assessment because it had burned down. A more recent note on the same card showed that the house, which we found had been renovated, had just sold for more than $100,000.
Learn the local rules.
Counties often have quirky assessment rules, often dating back decades. Knowing them before you start searching the data will save you time, and some of the rules might be worth a story.
For example, in Lackawanna County corner lots are assessed at 25 percent more than non-corner lots. And church rectories are assessed at 10 percent of true value.
Quick tips
In Pennsylvania, talk to the State Tax Equalization Board to get the big picture and learn about the common-level ratio, a formula used to level out old assessments with new ones. Also check with the Pennsylvania Economy League, which keeps track of property tax reassessments. Similar organizations may exist in your state. Check the courthouse for lawsuits against the county assessor's office. Large companies often appeal tax assessments. Sort your database by municipality, or by school district, to see how property taxes fall in different parts of the same county. Because assessments don't change when a property is sold in Pennsylvania, areas that have prospered since the last reassessment tend to have relatively lower assessments than areas that have not. Check out the top businesses and politicians.
In Pennsylvania, tax assessments can be reduced by appeals boards filled with political appointees, so it's worth checking to see who has received a break.
Regardless of appeals, it's worth checking the assessments of local big businesses and politicians. In Lackawanna County, I discovered through the database that two huge landfills were each paying less in taxes than a typical large retailer would. One landfill, worth an estimated $600 million, was assessed at a lower value than a local hospital's parking garage because the county assessor's office considered landfills to be unimproved land - a position that assessors elsewhere scoffed at.
David Slade can be reached by e-mail at david.slade@mcall.com