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Home Page   Local News   Local Sports   Community Calendar   Opinion   Editorials   Columns   Letters to the Editor   Archives   News Archives   Sports Archives	2-14-2007 Reval offers good news The village's revaluation of property has been completed and hidden in all those numbers is some unforeseen good news for village taxpayers. By now, property owners have received notice of the change in their assessed value and we would be willing to bet many of them equate it with a higher tax bill. And that may be the case for some property owners - mostly those who had been enjoying an assessment that hadn't kept pace with rising values since the last reval 20 years ago. Now, all properties in the village are assessed at 100 percent of their value and everyone should be paying their fair share. With all the additional assessed value, tax rates should drop if budgets don't increase. If the new property assessments were applied to the tax levy in last year's village budget, the tax rate would have fallen from $13.90 to $4.36 per thousand dollars of assessed value. Because of all the new assessed value that accompanies a reval, it's a good time to keep an eye on the next budget and its tax levy, or the amount to be raised by taxes. Officials - and not necessarily those in the village - have been known to use that opportunity to pad a budget with extra spending. For example, if last year's tax levy was doubled and the new assessments applied, the rate would still drop more than $5 a thousand. Officials could tout a significant drop in the tax rate, but it would be misleading. The best news in the reval may be the drop in the percentage of the total assessed value of all property that is tax exempt. In past years, that percentage was as high as 45 percent. Last year, it had slipped to just under 40 percent. But because of the rapidly escalating value of property, particularly vacant and lakefront parcels, that percentage has now been cut almost in half. The reason, according to Village Assessor Al Keck, is likely the fact that many wholly exempt properties like churches, the Baseball Hall of Fame and Bassett Hospital are unique. Their value is not market driven the way single-family homes and commercial properties are. To understand the impact, look again at last year's tax levy - the new ratio of exempt properties would have caused the tax rate to fall from $13.90 to $10.78 per thousand - a savings of $3.12. For a property with a $200,000 assessed value, that's a decrease of $624. It means that the tax levy will now be spread over almost 80 percent of the total assessed value instead of the 55 to 60 percent in the past. We recognize that some property owners may be paying higher bills because their homes or businesses are worth much more, but for taxpayers in general, the change in exempt property should be welcome news.
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