Property Tax Revaluation: What's Next?

The Finance Committee of the Village of Scarsdale Board of Trustees met on Thursday, September 4, 2014 to discuss property tax revaluation. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about the Scarsdale Village plan for property assessments on an ongoing basis. The meeting did not pertain to the recent Tyler Technologies assessment revaluation project and did not provide any information regarding the status of the 950 grievances that were filed with the village as a result of the Tyler Assessment except to say that a report will be issued on September 15, 2014 with the Board of Assessment Review's final decisions.

Village Manager Al Gatta presented the Board of Trustees with two options for property assessments going forward. The first option would be to update assessed values on an annual basis using sales data and market trends to make Village-wide adjustments to assessed values. Mr. Gatta estimated the cost of annual updates to be approximately $50,000-$100,000 per year. This method would have the Village maintain property assessment values at 100% of market value. Annual updates would allow the village to correct any under assessed property that may have been overlooked in the recent assessment project, but there was also some concern that it could lead to a large number of grievances each year. Even with yearly updates, a full reappraisal is required in 2017. (A full reappraisal is required every 4 years under any plan the Village adopts.) A full reappraisal reviews and assesses properties on an individual basis. It would be expected that adjustments resulting from the full reappraisal would be minimal, as the assessment values would have been updated yearly under this plan. Mr. Gatta estimated the cost of the full reappraisal to be $250K-$350K.

The second option is a full reassessment every four years only with the next assessment in 2017. The cost estimated for this option is $250K-$350K (same as the cost for this process shown above). Under this option, assessed market values slip until the next full assessment. The number of grievances in non-assessment years would be expected to be minimal with spikes during the revaluation years. Under this plan, if the Village identified a property that was under-assessed, it would not be able to act on any adjustment until an appraisal year.

It is important to note that under either option, the Village can still conduct tax assessments on new construction and additions/improvements to existing homes. Further, under either option, the village is required to complete a visual inspection (from the exterior) of each property on the tax roll every six years.

There was no decision made at this meeting and Mayor Steves wanted to give the Trustees some time to think about the issue. He acknowledged that a decision would have to be made soon especially if option one is selected. He plans to put this topic on the agenda for a meeting in approximately two weeks.

There was also some brief discussion during the meeting about whether the data from the current 950 grievances would be or could be analyzed to determine any trends. For example, would it show that there was a neighborhood without any grievances or a neighborhood with the majority of grievances? The Scarsdale Village Office of the Tax Assessor does not conduct this type of analyses. However, the information will be made public with the report on September 15 and it is expected that some citizens may try to look at the data to identify trends. The Board of Trustees is wondering whether analyses of the data would help to address community concerns about the appraisal process and bias, but there is not a clear answer to be provided at this time. It's likely this issue will discussed more intently after the grievance results report comes out on September 15.