TARTE

Jan. 31 With property re-valuation cases stacking up, and municipal budget time fast approaching, the town of Cornelius is looking for answers from Mecklenburg County about process and procedures. Indeed, a letter from the Town Board of Cornelius signed by Mayor Jeff Tarte today asks that "a moratorium be immediately put into place on processing further revaluation appeals until all affected citizens are assure of due process, fair and equal treatment and adequate information to make informed decisions."

Although tax bills have been sent with new valuations--many of them substantially higher than the 2003 valuation and higher than current property values--the backlog of appeals is said to be enormous, based on the number that can be heard each day.

COGDELL

While Mecklenburg officials are still looking at ways to speed up the handling of appeals,  The board handles appeals where a property owner isn't satisfied with the results of an informal review by county staff. It has been meeting since August and currently considers 75 cases a day, three times per week.

The stakes are high. In a town with literally thousands of houses valued at more than $500,000, a property owners bill can soar from $5,000 a year to $7,500 a year if the appraisal climbs 50 percent. Some waterfront property appraisals have risen more than that.

It's happened to senior citizens who bought lakefront properties years ago. Bob Deaton, a retiree on Belle Isle Drive, saw his property valuation climb from $568,000 to $937,000.

Mayor Pro Tem Lynette Rinker said the "outrageous part" is that the County has followed the letter of the revaluation law. "I would argue perhaps not the laws of customer relations, so our next step will be to work with our legislative delegation to change the law to include more explicit protections for our taxpayers so that there are caps on the percentage a property can go up and more protections for senior citizens so they are not forced out of their homes," she said.

Bill Rakatansky, a resident of Norman Shores, said his dealings with the County Tax Assessors office have been confusing at best. "There is a default in-house system that no one knows about," he said.

The letter sent by the Town Board to the Mecklenburg County Board Chairman Harold Cogdell and James Barnett, chairman of the Board of Equalization and Review, said there are "drastically disparate assessed values between neighbors or within neighborhoods."

Mecklenburg reset property values this year for the first time since 2003. Most values rose, but about a third of single-family homes in the county lost value, the biggest percentage in decades.

The county received more than 36,000 challenges to the new values, and officials said in November that just over half of the informal reviews have been completed. Of those, less than 7,000 property owners have advanced their appeals to the Board of Equalization and Review.

At the meetings, property owners get five minutes to explain why the value of their home or business should be changed. Homeowners are asked to submit evidence at least 10 days in advance, though the county plans to ask owners to provide the information sooner.

The letter signed by Mayor Tarte said that homeowners who appeal are often denied access to the "value information relied on by the county."