LTE: Clay County Property Valuations

Along with our Christmas mail I found a Holiday Greeting post card from Clay County in the form of the long awaited property revaluation notice. I’m certain this has added to the seasonal cheer of just about every resident of our county! I certainly realize that our tax dollars are needed to provide the funding for schools, health, police, emergency, fire, and various other social services. All of these are indeed deserving and very important to our quality of life. However, coast to coast, north, south, east and west we are in a deep recession. All home and property (including commercial property) values have collapsed. I don’t believe there is anyone who can honestly say they have not been affected by the financial and property collapse. To quote our Federal Govt. statistics as published in Wikipedia a few months ago: “At the National level, housing prices peaked in 2005, started to decline in 2006, and may not have yet hit the bottom.” In addition, on May 26, 2009 the Standard and Poor / Case-Shiller National Price Index Report states this finding of fact: “As of March 2009, average home prices across the United States are at similar levels to what they were in the fourth quarter of 2002” Hmmm, now consider this: My home is nothing special, a moderate size mountain home, nearly 30 years old, 3 bedrooms, 1 fireplace, cedar plank covered up with vinyl plastic siding, and sitting on under 4 acres of hilly property. It’s definitely not a McMansion and I’m not near the lake or in a large ritzy prime subdivision. Heck, the only time I have a view of the water is when it rains. None the less, my revaluation came in at $89,400 more than 5 years ago! To put this into perspective they are trying to tell me and want me to believe and accept that my property increased in value by $1,500 PER MONTH each and every month or $50 a day for 5 years! Try this on your own increase, divide it out and see what numbers you come up with and if it makes any sense to you? To me it is all stupidly absurd. Something is vastly wrong here. It’s as if the appraisers are trying to ignore the recession and real estate, property bubble burst and somehow convince everyone in Clay County that this is the only place in the entire USA where prices have defied gravity and increased, a lot! By what our federal govt. reports and nation wide research data indicates to me is that many of our counties properties are about the same or may have actually declined in value from our last assessment. With all this in mind, I don’t believe any property in this county has increased in value beyond a single digit percentage. Consider all the new developments around here that have failed or how prices have been slashed, excuse me, chain sawed and they still can’t sell the homes to break even, or even sell at a loss to get out from under the payments. Then consider those all around us out of work, barely scraping by, scrimping to pay their mortgage and feed their kids. How about our senior citizens on a fixed social security income pittance? Three to Five Hundred dollars of an increase in taxes may not be much to some folks, but to quite a few, perhaps more than you even realize, it pays to heat their homes for a few months over the winter or put food on the table! Oh, by the way, you only have till January 7 to phone for and request a meeting to appeal the increase. Your choice is to stand up and be counted or roll over. I personally suspect they really don’t want to hear it. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

Robert Haas- Hayesville, NC