WELLSBORO — The county-wide reassessment is accurate and restored fairness and equity for property owners, according to a follow-up review.
The county hired the International Association of Assessing Officers to oversee the reassessment process and look at results post-reassessment, said Chief Assessor Joshua Zeyn. The company oversaw the process throughout the entire multi-year reassessment.
In a project summary issued in December 2023, the consultant compared the new assessed values to sale value and the ratio of those two. A desired range is 90-110%, Zeyn said. The county was at 47% prior to the reassessment.
That, said Commissioners Sam VanLoon, Marc Rice and Shane Nickerson, is an indicator that the playing field was leveled and made fair for all property owners. As stated by the prior board of commissioners and by law, reassessments are revenue neutral. That means, because property values rose, taxing bodies had to adjust the millage downward.
County, borough and township millages have been reduced, usually by about half. It is expected that school district millage will see a similar decrease when they adopt their budgets in June, Zeyn said.
“The most important thing is the statistic that the reassessment is revenue neutral,” Rice said. “The county isn’t going to generate any more revenue nor is any taxing district generating more revenue. We verified that was true.”
Property owners had opportunities to appeal the changed values throughout the process. Of the 28,226 parcels, the county held informal hearings, the first level of the appeal process, for more than 4,000 parcels. That was slightly higher than anticipated, Zeyn said, representing about 14%, higher than the anticipated 10%.
However, that was offset by the number of formal appeals. Anticipating 5% of property owners would file formal appeals, the county only had 2.3%, or around 650 take place.
“We were able to resolve the questions most property owners have and the valuation issues through the formal appeal process,” Zeyn said.
In November 2023, the county certified the county/municipal tax base for 2024 with a total value of $3,850,417,880, compared to the 2023 value of $1,897,756,377.
With the new values, the county millage went from 6.75 mills to 3.32 mills, a 50+% decrease.
Also as predicted by the prior board, about one-third of taxpayers saw their tax bill go down by more than $150, one-third went up by more than $150 and the remaining one-third stayed within $150 of the previous tax bill.
“When you do a reassessment, for every person whose taxes go up, there is another person whose taxes go down,” Zeyn said. “The goal of the reassessment is to correct uniformity, to correct the people who are overpaying and underpaying taxes.”
During the reassessment process, the county discovered houses that were not on the tax rolls, additions that had not been recorded, cabins that had been built but not included in the tax bill. That created the situation where some people were paying more taxes to offset the property owners who were not paying taxes on new construction.
“When things are that far out of what, it’s unfair,” Nickerson said. “A lot of people were paying a tax burden they did not need to.”
While property values are accurate now, that will change with new construction and changes in the buying market. In November 2023, the prior board of commissioners adopted a resolution to hold a county-wide reassessment every four to six years. For the first properties visited for reassessment in 2020, four years will have passed since then.
“The biggest challenge, when you wait so long, is basically you’re starting from scratch,” Zeyn said.
Affordability is a key word with the new board and Zeyn. With the price tag of nearly $1.8 million or $62/parcel, the county is looking at ways to reduce the cost and time of future reassessments, he added. The county is looking at using existing staff and technology to monitor changes at each parcel.
In the past, said Zeyn, assessors would perform site visits only when the office received notice of a building permit, a demolition permit or observed a change. Today’s digital imaging and detection software will show new construction, demolitions or changes to any buildings on a property.
Quality checks during the reassessment process provided training for field assessors to ensure that measurements are accurate and information is input correctly.
In addition, the county is looking at making site visits to every parcel in the county on a cyclical basis, ie, visiting one-fourth of all parcels each year to compare records.
That should help not only with fairness, but also future costs.
“Going forward, doing the cyclical thing is good in use of both time and budget,” VanLoon said. “We’re looking forward to doing it more efficiently so it’s not a huge, overgrown beast and so the workload is more efficient and manageable for everyone in the process.
The full list of county and municipal tax rates is found on the Tioga County website at www.tiogacountypa.us/departments/assessment.
