Assessor ranks among the most difficult of publicly elected jobs you can have, in my opinion. Kudos to Platte County Assessor David Cox for pushing back to criticism over the state order to raise values. The entire system is simply broken, and it gets more broken every time a law is passed that meddles in the process. Cox points out that the commercial values that the taxation system relies upon have been significantly adjusted, beyond his authority. Without commercial values propping up the tax base, home values come under additional scrutiny.
The system is supposed to be based on market value, and we all know that homes and commercial property are rarely close to market value on the tax rolls, but we all wink and nod. Not just Platte County, it’s the entire state of Missouri.
Then you throw in laws that freeze values for certain sectors and a whole multitude of appeals that are often based on questionable data, and you get to see that property assessment is more akin to sausage making than anything else and this is what happens. There is no solution beyond starting over and that’s not going to happen. I can show you 113 other counties in Missouri that have similar issues and pinning it on one elected official or even one board is the easy way out.
Have I mentioned the senior tax/valuation freeze is a tax increase on young homeowners? If not, please note the record of my opinion. Instead of naming a park bench after me when I’m gone, put that on a plaque on the bench, somewhere near a courthouse.
I hate to say this, but if you want to see good property assessment, just slide across the river. Kansas is a disclosure state, requiring real property sales prices to be reported to the government. Missouri is a non-disclosure state that does not require reporting. Kansas pours lots of resources into assessment and property assessment tools and software and it shows. Their county valuations are much closer to market value and while it creates controversy from time to time, it’s nowhere near the chaos of the Missouri system.
Small sample size, but to test my theory, I looked at a couple of home sales within a stones throw of the Platte County Courthouse. A house on First Street sold for $145,000 in July. Market value listed by the assessor was $68,834 at the time of the sale. A house on Arehart Street sold for $203,995 in June and had a market value from the county of $129,212.
Now, multiply that by thousands of properties.
All the political posturing and blame is not fixing this. It’s much bigger than Platte County.
Honestly, solving the Missouri property assessment problems would need a committee bigger than the committee that is trying to fix education funding, the people that actually started this local firestorm of politics. Probably need a bunch of co-chairs and such to fix this. The coffee and doughnut budget would be astronomical.
That was a bunch of words to tell you that I have no solutions other than let’s all just get along.
(Guy Speckman can be reached singing Kumbaya on the courthouse lawn)
