Post by Dan Cummings - They say (whoever "they" are) you can't fight city hall. And, you can translate that as town hall, if you like. And yet, last week, we found out that if something's clearly just not right...you can fight...and win.
I'm talking about the town of Cicero, and the hundreds of new, residential property assessments that were, in many cases, "just not right." Objectively, real estate professionals who work in Cicero told me that so many of the homeowners who called and e-mailed Newschannel 9's Your Stories to complain about their soaring assessments...were, in fact, correct to complain. There was no market data to support some of the huge increases along the waterfront...from Brewerton to Chittenango Creek and most places in between.
Indeed, I was told that recent comparable sales data did NOT support some of the new values attached to these homes. Many homeowners were seeing increases that ran as high as 200, 300, in at least one case, more than 400 percent.
The assessor, Anita Barnello, is reluctantly accepting the town board's extraordinary move of Friday morning, May 16-th...and will, at the board's unanimous request, throw out the new assessments she came up with, in favor of a revised roll to be submitted by July 1-st. The new assessments will be rolled back to last year's levels...with the exception of homes where physical improvements or additions have been made recently.
The town board also set up a special committee to recommend how to go about the assessment process in the future.
So the taxpayers' fight that won at Cicero Town Hall? The outpouring of complaints about unfair, and unjustified assessments. The town board listened and took action.
But this fight is clearly not over. Questions remain, including: how and why did the assessor come up with some of the huge increases to begin with? Her answers to me on this one were incomplete. Was she under some pressure from someone outside the assessor's office to hike the values so much? (She says town supervisor Chet Dudzinski told her to reassess the waterfront, but didn't tell her how high to go. Dudzinski says it was Barnello who told HIM she was going to make a priority of those homes, and he said, "OK." But nothing more).
In any event, the waterfront homeowners in Cicero need to be prepared for NEXT year. Without question, the market value of many of those properties HAS, in fact, gone up recently, and where assessments need to be updated, increases are a certainty. But next time, the town assessor needs to make a better case for the size of those increases, and she's already indicated that the town may need to phase them in over two or three years, instead of hitting people all at once.
