It happens every year when property tax bills appear in mailboxes.
If you’re a regular visitor to the Government Center in Danville, you’ll notice a slightly larger police presence … and some remarkably furious folks. They make their way to the Auditor, Assessor, and Treasurer’s offices and wait for their chance to scream at the people who work there for demanding so much in property taxes or setting ridiculous valuations for their homes.
None of the people they scream at have anything to do with making those decisions.
Although Indiana’s property taxes are a fraction of what homeowners pay in most other states, every homeowner I know thinks they’re too damned high. (Even people not given to swearing seem to use that word when this subject arises.) Nobody gets their tax bill and exclaims, “This is a delightful amount of money to pay.”
While the people in those three county offices do have a hand in property taxes, they aren’t the ones deciding what you’ll pay. First, there’s a tax rate, which is made up of several smaller rates. The school district gets so many cents, the town gets some, the library gets a couple pennies, and so forth. But the people in the offices have absolutely nothing to do with setting those tax rates. The rates are determined by town councils and school boards and library boards and such. They create their budgets, determine what tax rate would be required based upon the valuation of property in their area, and submit that for state approval. The approved rates created by those other bodies and vetted by state government are what those county employees use to determine what you owe.
Then there’s the other piece: what’s your property worth? While folks on social media chatter sites like to suggest there’s a vast conspiracy in which the same people who are taxing them are artificially inflating the value of their homes, the reality is much more boring.
Your home’s value is determined by a state-mandated formula based on actual sales of other homes in your community. If you live in a 25-year-old three-bedroom, two-bath frame home on a quarter-acre lot, the formula looks at what houses of similar size, location, and composition have sold for in recent months. Is it an accurate system? Probably not as much as you’d like, but it’s the best the folks in the Statehouse were able to create when the courts demanded a fairer system than the old one. (I’ll discuss the old system in a future column. I promise it will bewilder you.)
So if you indeed believe your assessment or your bill is too damned high, by all means, you should use your legal right to contest it. Just don’t yell at those county folks. They’re not to blame. Treat them kindly, and they’ll be happy to tell you what steps to take. And then you can thank them for their help.