Property values on the decline

Wahkiakum County Assessor Bill Coons has good news and bad news for property owners.

The good news is that property valuations are going down to reflect trends in the real estate market.

The bad news is that property tax rates may go up to meet the amounts already set for collection in tax levies.

"Given our system of taxation, just because values go down doesn't mean taxes will go down commensurately," Coons said Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Coons informed the board of county commissioners that after the valuation of property in eastern Wahkiakum County, he calculated that the assessed value of the property supporting the Current Expense Fund levy had declined 12.2 percent since last year.

"This end of the county (that which is roughly inside the boundaries of Fire District 4, or, east from the Elochoman Valley) was valued at the peak of the market, January 2008, and it has done nothing but drop roughly 1 percent a month since then," he said.

The one year decline in assessed property value for other levies ranges from a low of 9.3 percent for the County Road Fund to 28.8 percent for the Town of Cathlamet. The property value decline for the state levy will be 22.6 percent, and for Port District 1, 23 percent.

Property owners could see their tax rates rise, Coons said, but there is a statutory limit of a 1 percent increase on collections, and a quick, rough calculation showed the levies wouldn't be approaching those limits, Coons said.

"We're quite a way from that (hitting the statutory limits), but the value can't keep dropping like this," he said. "I hope we've leveled out."

He added that this might be the case, for a couple recent sales in the Westend were for over the assessed value of the properties.

Coons hopes the move to annual revaluations will ease the swings in property assessments.

For years, the assessor's office has revalued one portion of the county every four years. This means property in one area may become over valued or undervalued as the real estate market ebbs or flows.

"It sloshes the tax burden from one end of the county to the other," Coons said.

The county has a state imposed deadline of 2014 for moving to an annual revaluation program.

The assessor's office has been working on a backlog of updating assessments and entering them into the county's new property records computer program.

Coons said he will ask the commissioners to authorize use of Real Estate Excise Tax (REET) funds to cover overtime for staff, up to a limit of $3,000, to work on the project and show how many parcels per hour staff can process. That will show the potential expense of entering the old records.

"The overtime will be used to enter info now held on paper packets and to restructure the computer records," Coons told The Eagle. "We will probably start with 2009 (western county) records so we are ahead of the game for next year's revaluation."

The 2011, 2012 and 2013 values will be statistically updated in 2014.