Property value changes coming

Report by outside consultant does not verify 2008 claims, says auditor.

Property value issues deep

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By Bridgette Outten, Staff Writer Updated 8:32 AM Monday, July 26, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — Two years ago, a former Clark County Auditor’s Office employee, Lynn Marshall, criticized his boss, county Auditor George Sodders and his office’s handling of the 2007 countywide property revaluation.

He said inconsistencies in the revaluation process, which the county paid $1.2 million to conduct, stemmed from “various performance and quality control problems.” And at a meeting in March with the Clark County commissioners, Marshall said that applying factors and adjustments — which can include overrides of final property values or changes to property data — on top of incorrect data had skewed the values even more.

Sodders denied the charges and defended the valuation process. Marshall did not have the expertise to analyze what went wrong with the revaluation, Sodders said.

Marshall ultimately resigned from the auditor’s office after an investigation into his mileage and overtime revealed that he had been paid for meetings that he never attended. He was ordered to repay the county about $1,800.

But a report conducted in January for the County Auditor’s office makes many of the same conclusions that Marshall levied in 2008. The report, which Sodder’s office contracted to have done in January but which was not released publicly, analyzed the county’s Computer-assisted Mass Appraisal (CAMA) system.

The report showed that 33,244 adjustments, factors and overrides had been applied to property values in 2007 with 12 percent of them made on final value overrides made on 3,958 properties.

The report recommended the removal of “all overrides, factors and unncessary adjustments,” over the next three years so that, by 2013, property in Clark County might again have consistent taxable values.

“Until then, final value overrides will continue to increase as a result of data inconsistencies,” the report said. “In addition, continual use of final value overrides further create inequities among properties, complicating the valuation process.”

Having factors  ‘not out of place’

The report is not meant to verify anything Marshall claimed back in 2008, according to the report’s author and Sodders.

“We didn’t complete it to validate or invalidate (Marshall’s) statements,” said Lou Caldwell, Tyler Technologies southwest Ohio area director.

Caldwell said the county’s adjustments are understandable, especially during a market downturn, a theme local officials have echoed.

“The term ‘normal’ in the real estate market — those days are gone, at least for the foreseeable future and the most recent past,” Caldwell said.

Applying adjustments is typical in any county and especially within Clark County, auditor’s office consultant John Ebert told the News-Sun in a recent interview.

“... applying factors is a fundamental part of any CAMA system, especially one as robust as is the one the county has,” Ebert said. “So the matter of having factors, and lots of them, is not out of place or inordinate in this CAMA system.”

Sodders said the 2007 revaluation did not prompt the report, which was completed by Dayton-based Tyler Technologies.

“(The revaluation) had nothing to do with having the report done for us,” he said.

The 2007 revaluation, which was completed for $1.2 million by Appraisal Research Corp., resulted in a record-breaking number of appeals after properties appeared to be overvauled and undervalued throughout the county.

Sodders blamed the inconsistencies on the real estate market fluctuations driven by the economic downturn.

In 2008, a News-Sun review of internal e-mails and documents from the auditor’s office revealed employees had concerns about data submitted in the reappraisal.

At the time, Sodders said “pockets” of properties in the area needed to be revisited, but there was no “universal property value problem in Clark County.”

Sodders defended 2008 property value changes that the Ohio Department of Taxation said were changed illegally, without Board of Revision appeals.

The auditor maintained changes made after property tax bills were mailed were legal because they were clerical errors.

Sodders then hired Ebert to review the revaluation that year.

Ebert said the 2009 equalization project was responsible for more than 14,000 overrides and adjustments because officials were changing the values of local properties to reflect the declining market.

“What appears to be an excessive number of overrides would be true if you were in an ordinary situation where a jurisdiction is not seeking to update its values according to market value,” Ebert explained.

“In the case, in any year, not only can you adjust the value, you’re obligated to if you know the value ought to be different than what is there,” he added.

Clark County’s Board of Revision, which hears property tax appeals, also makes recommendations on values that are considered final value overrides, Sodders said.

The county had 2,836 appeals in 2008, 710 appeals in 2009 and 480 in 2010.

Moving forward

The changes recommended by the report will be implemented in time for the 2013 revaluation, which is when factors, adjustments and overrides will be eliminated, according to Sodders.

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