No one seems to know why the county opted for the 25% valuation, Paul Miller, senior account executive for Tyler Technologies, the company Monroe County hired to perform the reassessment, said in a February 2019 interview with Pocono Record writer Bill Cameron.
“Back then, they used to say, ‘Well, we’re going to shoot for 25% of market value,’” Miller said. “I don’t know why. I genuinely think it was to confuse people like us. They’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s worth this much, but let’s put 25% on it and then they won’t know what it was.’ Nobody does that in this state anymore, but they did.”
Regardless, as all properties will be reassessed with the same metric, millage rates — which are determined by dividing a jurisdiction’s budget by the total value of the homes in the jurisdiction — should actually drop.
“That was the key issue, people that think that their taxes are going to go up four or five times, because they thought the valuation on their house — if you have a house that’s valued at $100,000, on our tax records it was valued at $125,000, and if that house is still only worth $100,000 — have to realize that the millage has to come down for that value to be at $100,000,” Christy said. Essentially, the value of your home has not multiplied by four; rather, the county is looking at the total value as opposed to one quarter of the value. “By going from the 25% to the 100%, you are able to look on your paper and say, ‘Yeah, that’s what my house or lot is worth in today’s market,’” Christy said. Homeowners have an opportunity to challenge their valuations during an appeals process, which will help to clear up some misconceptions and provide more accurate data for the county.
As for whether taxes overall will be on the rise, that is dependent upon each taxing entity. The county is in control of their tax rate alone, Christy said. “Each taxing entity — the townships, the boroughs, the county and the school districts — are all on their own,” Christy said. “What they do is, they have to take their value of what their budget is and the value of their properties, and that’s how they come up with the millage, and it has to be revenue-neutral.”
Christy explained that while the Commissioners may have preferred to change the rate a few years back, they were blocked from doing so due to bureaucratic measures. “There are laws that you can only change during the time of a reassessment,” Christy said. “Often times we’re hamstrung by codes in the county code.”
Thanks to the updated values, the county will have more relevant and up-to-date figures that better reflect the current status of the county as a whole, with assessment values matching market values for homes. In fact, many undervalued properties will contribute to a millage rate decrease overall. So, even if taxes do increase, they most certainly will not jump by four or five times the current rates. “What we’re trying to do is get the most accurate snapshot of values that we have to go forward with,” Christy said.
https://www.poconorecord.com/news/20190722/monroe-county-reassessment-raises-questions