More than 100 homeowners in Blaine County have appealed their 2009 property tax assessments—more than double the number of appeals that the assessor's office saw in 2008, when about 40 such challenges trickled in.
Most of this year's appeals are for condominiums in Sun Valley's Elkhorn neighborhood, Blaine County Assessor Valid Pace said just after noon on Monday, about five hours before the deadline for filing 2009 appeals.
The Blaine County Commission, acting in a secondary role as the county Board of Equalization, will consider the appeals beginning Thursday. Five days of appeal hearings are scheduled.
The lengthy hearings should end by July 7, though the county has until July 13 to consider all of the challenges.
That most of the appeals have come from condominium owners in Elkhorn is not surprising. The neighborhood was one of the few spots in the county that saw property assessments increase in 2009. Pace has previously said the rising values are the result of correcting several years of overlooked assessments on Elkhorn condominiums.
The county assessments are based on real estate sales data from 2008.
"I expected it in the condo world," Pace said. "We are certainly getting a lot of calls."
The assessor's office sent out more than 500 appeal forms to homeowners who requested them in recent weeks. However, Pace said she expected that most of the forms would not be returned by Monday's filing deadline.
She said a lot of the appeals for condominium assessments have been filed by out-of-state homeowners who use the properties as second homes. She said they don't understand why the values of their Sun Valley properties have risen while the assessments of their properties elsewhere have dropped in the down real estate economy.
"They think we should be in the same position as their states," she said.
Pace said homeowners who appeal their property tax assessments should bring real estate sales data from comparable properties to bolster their claims that they've been assessed too high. She said the assessor's office will bring its own data to back up the assessed values.
In the end, it's up to the commissioners to decide who's made the better case.
In a separate but related item, residents of 19 Idaho counties can get estimates for their 2009 property taxes by visiting the Idaho State Tax Commission's Web site at tax.idaho.gov. The site's home page links to a calculator that allows taxpayers to estimate what they will owe.
However, Blaine County is not among the counties for which the service is provided. A notice on the tax commission's Web site states that those counties did not provide it with the necessary data.
Jason Kauffman: jkauffman@mtexpress.com
