Question About Timing of Assessments
Question: I have a question and I do not know the legalities of it. I was wondering if you can vote to have an assessment any year or if they are on a schedule? Anyone who has their property on the market or trying to borrowing money to buy a house or a home improvement loan or equity loan has seen their property depreciate in value a huge amount over the last few months. I had my house independently appraised in July 2007. I had another appraisal done in February of this year just for curiosity, and it dropped in value 13% seven months. At that rate it will not take long for our property values to drop 25 to 30% or more. I am sure the town will not adjust our taxes accordingly. The town was just assessed and of course the values and taxes in Bow rose dramatically. If you watch the news they say we are going to have a major adjustment in property values all across the country. Actually, it has been adjusting for over a year now with no end in sight. A year from now the property values will be at less than 70% of what they were when they were assessed. Can we contract for an assessment when the economy is depressed or are we stuck with the high assessed values until the economy turns around and they need to raise the budget again?
And why do we get assessed by an out of state assessment company that is comfortable looking at 4 and 5 million dollar houses every day in their home state? Why don’t we contract a local assessor?
BCC Answer: The selectmen put them on as schedule but you could get a petitioned warrant article together and get 25 people to sign it. If you do get a warrant article together make sure it states what you want with regards to assessors. Unfortunately this cost money and you may get some resistance because people do not like having their house assessed due to privacy.