Nice.
According to The Buffalo News, reassessment is on hold again (still?).
The city’s long-postponed property reassessment probably won’t happen until 2011, Mayor Michael W. Tucker and acting Assessor Joseph Macaluso agreed last week.Before it happens, the city needs to hire a private company to carry out field work on every property, Macaluso said.
With the boondoggle that was the last round of assessments, the longer we wait, the better. Because that gives me the hope that it will be done right. Not a scatter shot of assessments. Not assessments that use houses that are in better neighborhoods for a comparison value. An honest and fair assessment. That's all we wanted before, and that's all we want now.
(Of course, I'd rather property taxes be based on the actual property, not the structures on the property, because the current way does not encourage development and improvements, but I digress.)
(And as a second digression, according to the Buffalo News Sunday paper, they will be allowing comments on all articles. Humm. Now I wonder what newspaper values me as a consumer of their product? But again, I'm digressing.)
Erik.
5 comments:
Hey, I just sent an e-mail on this topic but have not yet heard a reply.
My thoughts:
"Assessment article in today's paper: I have yet to search out unique systems. But it would be nice to have a system that rewards investment and sticking around long term and punishes neglect and the promotion of flight out of the city. There needs to be a way of rewarding/luring a middle class to be residents here. All the programs for low income families are great but a strong middle class needs to be present if not growing. Mixed incomes, like mixed uses are a great thing but difficult to pull off. How do we get moving here/investing to be a "no-brainer" when competing for residents in a state wide area experiencing population loss?"
The instance last year of the reduction in assessment of the F&M building because they neglected it and let water damage happen was a big slap in the face to the city.
Also +1 on at least partial land based taxation. Make it the best value to actually develop the land and not leave it an empty lot, parking lot, dump, etc.
The sad thing, is that the land based assessment was something I stole from News from One-Hundred years ago on WLVL. :(
I'm not even going to into the F&M building, that was stupidity incarnate.
http://www.lockportjournal.com/archivesearch/local_story_123003240.html
Seems Tim had an editorial on this in the past (May 3rd) and even credited the "web guys"
"It’s interesting what you’ll find on the Internet sometimes — especially on our newspaper Web site.
But lately our normally off-the-wall and sometimes obscene community discussion forum has been pretty constructive."
You have to love how we were all lumped together. But I digress ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
and...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax_in_the_United_States
"In 2000, Florenz Plassmann and Nicolaus Tideman wrote[22] that when comparing Pennsylvania cities using a higher tax rate on land value and a lower rate on improvements with similar sized Pennsylvania cities using the same rate on land and improvements, the higher land value taxation leads to increased construction within the jurisdiction"
As in, the value land is taxed at a higher percentage than the value of the buildings on it.
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