Nov 7, 2015 2 min read

While voters are concentrating on the 2016 presidential race, residents in Washington County have a property reassessment to understand and accept.

Since the county commissioners for the last 20 years chose to ignore the rise in market values of homes and land, tax revenues for the county, municipalities and school districts dipped. The taxing bodies, especially our school districts were severely short-changed in tax revenues for too many years. Hopefully, commissioners in the future will be more concerned with reassessing as market values increase.

All local elected commissioners, supervisors, council and mayors and school board members base taxes on assessed values – 20-plus years was too long to ignore a reassessment. While the law to pay on real estate was adopted in 1909, the real-estate tax law was later written to give direction to commissioners to know when to reassess so taxes can be fair and sufficient for their purposes. For future generations, hopefully the state will consider the problem lies with the clause that assessments are to be based on market values and when they increase it becomes an expensive project to reassess over and over again.

If this has to continue, unfair taxation will never go away.

Joann Diesel

Washington