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Nohero
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 23, 2001 - 5:15 pm: |     |
First off, thank you again to Jerry Ryan for providing facts about the revaluation results, in a useful form. From reading the posts, it appears that having some more facts has helped to raise the tone of the discussion.
I think this suggests that having more facts will help people understand what is happening, and understand how to deal with the results of the revaluation. One thing which comes through is that people just do not understand the facts on which their assessments are based. One would have thought that a company which specializes in revaluations would have been more forthcoming at the start, and provided more facts to be disseminated to the community, so that the resulting valuations could be better understood. We should not have been required to take extra steps in order to obtain some basic information about how the company arrived at the value assigned to our homes. Again, one would think that a company in this business would know that they need to provide more.
I would hope that seeing these numbers in context would help reduce the more heated accusations, about "class war", etc. I also hope that this information helps bring an end to one of the themes that has persisted through this (and which was alluded to during the election): that the revaluation is a "back door" way of raising taxes. Jerry's spreadsheet shows that the collections under the new and old valuations are the same.
(Note: I did it a different way, just comparing the total "positive" changes to the "negative" changes [i.e., increases and decreases]. I backed out the "exempt" properties before doing that calculation, and came out with about $6.088 million of decreases and $5.937 million of increases. I know it's not exact, but I am not qualified to use either a pocket protector or an HP calculator.)
Our household has requested a copy of our more detailed information from Certified (it seems like something everyone should do). We will have a tax increase under the new assessment (about 30%), but won't be lighting torches or carrying pitchforks down to the meeting tonight. We are interested in getting as much information as possible, and encourage Messrs. Ryan and DeLuca, the other committee members, and the other responsible officials, to continue their efforts to keep us informed. |
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