'You just don't get it,' county tax officials told -
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Published on: 3/12/2003
Last Visited: 6/12/2003
It was a frustrating night at the Southport Community Center for county tax administrator Boyd Williamson.He began the night by asking residents to allow him to leave town by the method he had arrived: "In a car on N. C. 211, not floating down the river."
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Williamson never did say he disagreed.He did say that Southport's revaluation had been scrutinized more carefully than any other area of the county.
"Obviously," someone heckled.
The reason Southport was scrutinized so carefully was Williamson's advance knowledge that Southport's values would skyrocket in the revaluation.Indeed, with a 47-percent overall increase over four years - more than twice the rate of growth countywide - Williamson and his staff knew there would be some kind of reaction.
"We didn't set these values," Williamson explained after the meeting, "that's the hardest thing to communicate.These numbers aren't ours," he said, pointing to the list that broke down the percentage increase countywide.
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"Southport is a premium destination," Williamson concluded.
"It sure is now," came a response from the audience.
Williamson pointed to one community in the rural part of the county where values actually had decreased since the 1998 revaluation.
"That was caused by trailers, and dilapidated structures and by all the sorts of things that makes a community an undesirable place to live," Williamson explained.
Southport, to say the very least, is not undesirable.
"Quality, location and desirability," Williamson said - that's what drives market values higher.Some of the factors that supported those drivers are historic properties, the waterfront view, live oaks, quaint cottages and stately Victorian architecture - all those things that make Southport a place people want to live.
Answering an oft-asked question, Williamson said realtors' offering prices had "absolutely nothing" to do with the assessed value.Only actual sales figures are used, he vowed.
Williamson and Long used logic and statistics.
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But Williamson said he was confident that any increase in spending would have produced no proportionate increase in accuracy.He said all appraisers met the state's training and certification standards.
Williamson said the proof would be in the pudding.Tax administrators accept a ten-percent appeals factor as an indicator that an appraisal was well done.So far, 200 Southport property owners out of 2,800 have appealed.The nominal 30-day appeal deadline expired Thursday, but Williamson said appeals would still be accepted as long as possible.
But one resident countered, "Just because we don't appeal doesn't mean we aren't concerned.We are discouraged, feeling beaten down by government."
Asked if the tax office could come to Southport and set up a station to accept appeals, Williamson said there was nothing in the statutes that would prevent such an off-site program.
‘Why should we have to appeal?'Resident Pat Genovese, using hand gestures for quotation marks, said people's "beach houses" are "putting me out of my neighborhood."
Genovese then questioned William-son extensively about the process and wondered why there was so much apparent inconsistency from one property to another.
There could have been renovations at one property that building permits brought to attention of assessors, Boyd used by way of example.Perhaps a rate-of-increase inconsistency was caused in a previous revaluation when one property was assessed too low and another on-the-money.There could be several explanations, Williamson said, and the appeals process is designed to look at such questions.
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