The effects of a five-year reappraisal program in Salt Lake County will be seen on tax notices this year in West Valley City, Kearns and the Taylorsville/Bennion area.
And the Salt Lake County assessor's office, which is conducting the reappraisals, is used to getting complaints from people whose property value has changed because of the process regardless of whether it went up or down.When property values go up, the homeowner usually ends up paying more taxes - the most likely source of a complaint, said Chief Deputy County Assessor E. Lee Brennen. But the assessor's office also fields complaints from people whose property values went down during the reappraisal process.
One group of West Valley property owners is even concerned that their properties are being set up for condemnation because of a drop in their property's assessed value, she said. But she said the assessor's office doesn't have an interest in affecting a property's value just so another government entity could take control of it.
One thing Brennen wants to make clear about the assessor's office is that while it sets a property's value, the office does not determine what portion of that value will be taxed - that's a task left to the school districts, municipal governments, county commission and other taxing entities like water, sewer and special improvement districts.
Brennen said the assessor's office is responsible for tracking each property's value every year. But there is no way the assessor's staff can visit each of the 250,000 properties in the county annually. Some parcels, she said, have not been reassessed for a number of years.
When a property is reappraised, "The surprise to people is how their property value could change so much in one year," Brennen said. But the change in assessment - either up or down - might really reflect the property's change in value over as much as 10 years.
The county began a property-by-property reassessment in the Sandy area in 1988. It moved west to West Jordan and the southwest part of the county in 1989 and then recalculated values in West Valley and the unincorporated areas north of West Jordan this year. The heart of Salt Lake City is scheduled for reappraisal in 1991 with the Holladay and canyon areas of the county scheduled for reappraisal in 1992.