TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Oct. 22, 2009 – Fighting property taxes would cost more under a push to more than triple filing fees imposed on taxpayers appealing their tax bills.
Property owners statewide can now pay $15 to appeal their tax assessments. Palm Beach County officials are calling for the Legislature to increase that statewide fee to $50.
This comes as more South Florida property owners are filing appeals to try to reduce what they owe in property taxes amid an economic recession.
The $15 fee isn’t enough to cover processing costs to consider appeals, according to Palm Beach County’s Value Adjustment Board.
Palm Beach County contends it costs about $43 per application to cover appeal costs that include holding a hearing with an independent magistrate who serves as a mediator.
Linda Phillips, supervisor of the Broward County Value Adjustment Board, said that her agency hasn’t calculated actual cost of processing tax appeals, but she knows it’s more than $15.
With the number of appeals increasing, the Legislature should boost the fee to $50, said Palm Beach County Commissioner Karen Marcus, who heads the county’s value adjustment aboard.
“People should be willing to pay what it costs to process,” Marcus said. “The rest of the taxpayers are going to have to subsidize them.”
The fee has been around for at least 20 years, Phillips said.
“We found a 1989 resolution that it was $15,” Phillips said. “It’s been $15 for a long time. It has not gone up.”
Meanwhile appeals have steadily increased over the last 15 years or so.
Appeals of property values used for tax assessments are increasing as more people grow frustrated that their property tax payments are staying the same or rising, even though their property values are dropping.
South Florida county property appraisers say their estimated property values are going down, but that property tax bills may remain the same or go up because of rising tax rates set by local governments as well as the differing effects of the state’s homestead exemption.
Appeals hit record numbers this year in Palm Beach County, which saw a 40 percent increase with 18,325 taxpayers filing to challenge their 2009 assessments.
In Broward County, the appeals increased 9 percent, to 32,411.
Miami-Dade County has yet to finish counting the appeals filed as of the September deadline. As of last week, about 69,000 petitions have been entered into Miami-Dade’s appeals system and the total is projected to far exceed the 70,000 filed last year.
Before raising the cost to file appeals, state legislators and local officials should look for ways to cut costs, said Robert Weissert, spokesman for Florida Tax Watch – a nonpartisan Tallahassee-based research group.
Too many times, state and local governments increase fees to help cover other expenses, Weissert said.
“We are seeing these fees raised more than necessary,” Weissert said. “It is absolutely vital that the citizens have an opportunity to challenge their property taxes.”
State legislators last spring resisted calls to boost property tax appeal filing fees, even as they changed state law to make the appeals process more taxpayer friendly.
In the past, county property appraisers benefited from a “presumption of correctness” that put the burden on taxpayers to prove that an assessment was wrong. Now county property appraisers have to go further to defend how they arrived at their numbers.
Changes to state law also now allow more leeway for property owners to file appeals late, if they can prove that an extraordinary circumstance, such as illness, delayed their application.
Copyright © 2009 Sun Sentinel,
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