Property and home owners, beware!

To The Eagle:

It appears more and more that the State of Washington is attempting to balance the budget on the backs of home and property owners by attempting to hold the line on the over assessed homes and property that are appraised at 25-50 percent over their 2011 market value. The valuation is depending on whether it is a home or property and its location.

Many of the properties were assessed higher than their market value at the peak of the market in 2007. Today the values have dropped 25-50 percent. The state is attempting to hold the old taxable values through different means such as retraining the boards of equalization in the different counties, not allowing foreclosure or stress sales to be used as comparatives to set value, auditing and attempting to pressure boards and assessors into slowing down the reduction of values true to their market value, and using the board of tax appeals to uphold the high values.

The board of tax appeals is not a board as most people know. It is a group of state employees who have no interest in what true market value is. They upheld approximately 95 percent of the assessments that had been reduced in Wahkiakum County by the Board of Equalization, using many excuses to hold the line on over taxation.

Wahkiakum now has an assessor that understands the problem and is attempting to clean up the problem left for him while trying to organize his office to get the county on an annual assessment in which the taxes could be brought to reflect the true market value annually. This leads to the question "Since we have been overtaxed since 2008 at a minimum, some over taxed since 2006, where do we, the taxpayer, go to get our money back?"

To do what has been done to the taxpayer in Wahkiakum County the past seven years has been nothing short of grand theft.

Michael C. Mouliot

Cathlamet