I would like to say something in support of our local county and township assessors and their staffs.
I am an Indiana level one certified appraiser and I was a member of the Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeal for a couple of years. So I have had the opportunity to be part of the process and to observe firsthand the local assessors and the relevant state agency, the Department of Local Government Finance.
Our local assessors are a sincere, hardworking, probably underpaid group of individuals. They try very hard to be fair to their constituents, the taxpayers, and to meet the needs of the local government of which they are part. I believe that they do a very good job at it. Any bias that is in their systems gets applied uniformly across all their taxpayers. The tax rate is then set based upon the government budget and the total assessed valuation so we individually end up paying an equitable share of the property taxes regardless if the system tends to over-assess or under-assess the properties some.
One of the factors the local assessors have to contend with is the state agency, the DLGF. The DLGF establishes the rules as to how the process is administered and sets the schedule. The problem is two-fold. The DLGF changes the rules in the middle of the process. And the DLGF does not abide by their own schedules that they have edicted and that they hold the local assessors responsible to. The assessors are dependent on the DLGF providing inputs and approvals in order to perform the assessors' processes and get the tax bills out on time. This is often a very stressful time for the assessors.
This year was an extreme example of the problem that this creates. My understanding is that there was an edict that Indiana was going to incorporate a concept called trending. That property tax valuations were going to be changed based upon the overall trend of market values. There was no or inadequate preparation on the part of the DLGF to implement this edict. But it got implemented anyway, property tax valuations went up by, I've read, 24 percent. And the property tax rates were never changed to reflect the higher valuations. So our property taxes went up 24 percent. Plus the rules and procedures changed. The DLGF in no way came close to meeting its own schedules. So our tax bills were very, very late in getting out.
Governor Mitch proposes eliminating the local elected county and tax assessors and replacing them with appointed assessors. I presume that this would be administered by the DLGF, regardless; the state bureaucracy rather than local electorate would administer it. I understand the legislators are currently considering this.
I feel that the state-appointed appraisers would not have the same commitment to supporting the local taxpayers and local government as our locally elected appraisers. Their allegiance would be to the state bureaucracy and to the governor and his administration, who are likely to have a different set of priorities than our local interests.
In essence, I believe that the proposal to replace our local elected assessors and staffs with state appointed assessors is an example of taking a system that is not broken and replacing it with a system that is broken.
