“Error on property tax bills inflates apparent increase over 2009” plus 1 more |
| Error on property tax bills inflates apparent increase over 2009 Posted: 17 Sep 2010 12:18 PM PDT More than 17,000 property tax bills mailed to Story County residents in Ames and Huxley listed incorrect tax histories that inflated the apparent increase over 2009 payments, Story County Treasurer Dave Jamison said Wednesday. "The error occurred in the levy rate for the prior year data, the comparison," Jamison said. "So it had no impact on the current year taxes or levy rates, but it did lead to a false impression of the amount of the increase." Property tax statements for Ames used a levy rate of $30.05 per $1,000 valuation for 2009 instead of $31.68, giving the appearance of an 8.5 percent property tax increase instead of the actual 2.9 percent increase. For Huxley, the statements used a levy rate of $39.27 per $1,000 valuation, showing a 4 percent tax increase instead of the actual 1 percent increase. Calculated tax payments, due by Sept. 30, were not affected by the data error. "The root of the problem is we've got kind of a jumbled-up mess for real estate software," Jamison said. "I've been advocating for years to get off our current setup, and we're doing that next year." Jamison said a clerk in his office discovered the error during the week of Aug. 1. He sent a memo to taxing authorities, including the city of Ames, on Aug. 25. "I told them it was my intention to not do anything further in terms of notifying the public, or sending mailers out," Jamison said. "I left it open to them that if they thought that would be helpful to their citizens, we could certainly look at that. But with nearly everything involved, there's some kind of expense."Reprinting and mailing the 17,172 erroneous statement, just under half of those mailed out in the county, would cost about $8,400, he said. Ames Finance Director Duane Pitcher said he e-mailed Jamison after Ames City Councilman Peter Orazem talked to him about a letter to the editor from Erik Charter, of Huxley, in the Sunday, Aug. 1, edition of The Tribune. Pitcher said he wrote to Jamison that the city received complaints and asked if Jamison planned to mail residents about the error. "We felt like the notice should come from him," Pitcher said. He received Jamison's Aug. 25 memo in response. "We were waiting for something else," Orazem said Wednesday. "I informed the other City Council people about two weeks ago that if this is all we're going to get, at the next meeting I'm going to make a statement." Orazem, who is elected at-large, addressed the error during the comments period of Tuesday's council meeting. "I thought the public was owed an explanation," he said. "We're public servants, even if you think it's a minor problem, you say a mistake was done and here is the nature of the mistake." Orazem said he wished the error was handled differently. "We get a lot of money from the public, they need to trust what we're doing," he said. Jamison said, "We understand that any error on the tax statement draws into question the credibility of all data on the tax statement, so we take this very serious, and we'll do everything we can to make sure these errors do not happen in the future." Jennifer Meyer can be reached at (515) 663-6918 or jmeyer@amestrib.com.
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| County property tax max: 0.6% boost Posted: 17 Sep 2010 01:04 PM PDT DULUTH — St. Louis County commissioners set their property tax levy increase maximum for 2011 at 0.6 percent on Tuesday, after some debate and other increase options of 0, 1.2 and 1.7 percent. If the increase remains as is by final certification in December, the levy would be set at $108,075,565, up from the final county levy of $107,428,991 in 2010. Join our Premium Online Membership to view the rest of the story. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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