For home owners, there a few things more stressful than dealing with an incorrect property tax assessment. The process can feel intimidating—trying to understand the law, gathering data and “comparables,” meeting with a local assessor, “grieving” before the Board of Assessment Review—because those in power hold so much sway over one’s financial future.
In our region, BARs are known often to give grievers token reductions (so they don’t feel they went away empty-handed) while protecting the Assessor’s underlying position overall. Meanwhile, citizens often suspect that their elected officials may have some kind of special “in” when it comes to the whole assessment process.
Recently, I spent several weeks quizzing City of Hudson officials and their attorney Cheryl Roberts over a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for documents related to a citywide assessment performed by GAR Associates, as part of a $170,000 contract. That contract was awarded by the Hudson Common Council and monitored by its President, Donald Moore. The documents eventually coughed up by the City show that Moore had extensive interactions with GAR, some in person and some via email.
In emails from the Fall of 2011, Moore can be seen going back and forth with GAR’s David Barnett about their ongoing work for the City—peppering him with questions about parcel counts, notifications, taxpayers conferences with GAR. All of these questions were seemingly relevant to the public task at hand.
Moore then addresses an email blast sent by local resident and politician Ellen Thurston, in which she urged constituents to double-check GAR’s new measurements and stats for their houses, since they had bungled hers badly. On September 16th, Moore addressed a host of other assessment topics in an email message before coming around to Thurston’s email:
I wish Alderman and soon to be County Supervisor Ellen Thurston hadn’t gone broadcast yesterday but she did. But I wish even more that your appraiser had not have [sic] missed her house completely.
More remarkably, the Council President then veers off into discussing his own property with the City’s assessment consultant:
Further, I need to measure my house. I am not sure you got my dimensions correctly. But I will get back to you today on that.
Barnett replies with some boilerplate instructions on how his firm calculates “dimensions and square footage” using each house’s external dimensions. If Moore indeed “got back to” Barnett about the topic as he promises above, it must have been by phone or in person, because that does not appear in the emails.
Now, Moore here does not ask explicitly in writing for any property tax reduction. And like every taxpayer, he has every right to check that GAR had his particulars correct.
But the process for doing so should be the same one that all “ordinary” taxpayers have to go through—not via direct messages within the context of managing a $170,000 contract. An implied reminder from the Common Council President to the City’s consultant about his own status as private property owner, overtly raising a potential concern about the stats which undergird his own home’s assessment, has no place in official communications.
This at minimum raises an appearance of impropriety, whether legal or not. In governmental ethics, appearances count because they can undermine public trust in the entire process.
Moore could point out that in the end his own tentative assessment for 2012 went up modestly, from $212,300 to $238,000, a 12% increase. But a look at all the 14 properties listed on the same block as Moore which are in the same class (210 Residential, meaning a single family) shows that the overall increase there was higher (18%) as was the average (20%). Moore’s house is tied for the 3rd lowest out of those 14 houses.
Two similar homes on the block were raised 49% each, and another was bumped up a whopping 80%, making 12% look very reasonable by comparison.
More nuggets sifted from the FOIL request will be forthcoming here over the next week or so.