South shore beach front residents see taxes jump
This summer, five property owners in the Crescent Beach area who saw their land assessments more than double since last year asked Mattapoisett lawyer Patricia McArdle for help.
Hearing there were others there whose assessments jumped, McArdle, who specializes in real estate, ran a newspaper advertisement seeking them out. She received responses from more than 40 people, some of whom saw their assessments skyrocket from the $340,000 range to more than $800,000 since last year.
“Something is just not right,” McArdle said. “We don’t know if it’s a math error or something they’re arbitrarily as sessing or what.”
Town officials stand behind their assessments, but McArdle has been assembling data to prepare for a possible court challenge.
The properties in question, McArdle said, are not giant homes on massive lots. Most are tiny homes, some no bigger than 1,000 square feet, rebuilt on stilts after Hurricane Bob in 1991 wiped nearly all of them out. The land value is what most upsets them, including homeowner Deborah Jackson, who has tried to sell her home at 4 Marston Court but is hamstrung by the assessment.
“I had someone interested, but when he saw my assessment, he backed out,” Jackson said of the property she has owned since 1997, when she bought it from a family who owned it for 30 years. “I haven’t heard from him since.”
Her land assessment last year was $341,400. This year it was $812,400.
“I wish I could sell it for that,” Jackson said of the higher figure.
The house on the lot - with 600 square feet of living area, according to Vision Appraisal of Northborough, the company hired by the town to do assessments - was assessed at $63,900.
A group of homeowners had their properties assessed independently, and her land came in at around $600,000, she said. “It’s an unreasonable encumbrance,” McArdle said of the town’s new figures. “It’s preventing people from selling.”
McArdle said she could not get figures from the town’s assessors’ department on the formula used to come up with the figures for 47 properties, so she filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the state Department of Revenue to get copies of documents submitted by the town to get this year’s assessments approved.
She got those figures early this month and expects to have them analyzed by early December. She hopes to get a hearing before the state Appellate Tax Board in early 2010.
“If I find a problem” in the way the assessments were calculated, she said, “I can file for action in Superior Court.”
Robert E. Cole, the town’s principal assessor, is sticking by the assessments. When asked about what some call astronomical assessments on Crescent Beach, he replied, “I don’t know that they went up astronomically.”
Cole said the land was assessed “according to state procedures, and the figures were certified by the Department of Revenue.”
He said the figures were derived from, among other things, comparable sales in the area “according to mandatory sales analysis, according to [Department of Revenue] regulation. If anything were out of whack, they wouldn’t have been certified” by the state.
Don Fleming, a lawyer who is chairman of the town’s Board of Assessors, also defended the figures, saying the town found comparable sale prices in the area to justify the assessments. He also said he is awaiting McArdle’s figures on comparable sales.
Last year, 50 landowners in town filed for abatements on assessments. This year, the number is more than 400, not all from the Crescent Beach area. Fleming said many have complained about increased assessment of residual land of larger parcels, also known as “back land.”
The Crescent Beach lots are too small to have excess land, but in other areas, residual land assessments run about $14,000 an acre, up from $3,000 at the last valuation.
“Historically, we had been valuing the back areas of land at a low price,” Fleming said. “The DOR was complaining, and it forced us to reassess that land, and it went up. A lot of people complained about it. We went through each and every abatement, many were satisfied, many weren’t.”
By Paul E. Kandarian, Globe Correspondent | November 19, 2009
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