Augusta needs lower tax rate

Wading through more than 38,000 residential reassessments in Augusta County is bound to reveal figures that displease, none perhaps more fittingly than the $20,000 that startled Sherri McCambridge. That is the new value for her half-acre plot, which four years ago came in at $7,700. The land in Crimora serves as a septic drain field, an apropos use for the 160 percent increase assessors divined for the property.

That was almost five times the average jump of 33.3 percent in the Middle River magisterial district, where McCambridge’s land is located. Other districts fared worse. Values soared by almost 50 percent in North River. In two other districts – Pastures and Middle River, neither of which is considered affluent – values increased by more than a third.

The figures are staggering at a time when governments elsewhere are staring at decreased home values and declining revenues, and the central Shenandoah Valley has been wobbled by the nationwide housing collapse and its ripple effect on the flooring industry. In two weeks, more than 200 Invista company workers will finish their shifts facing layoffs and gnawing uncertainty about their future prospects and the plant’s. Dozens of other workers at area companies tied to flooring are in similar predicaments.

McCambridge is part of that group. She recently was laid off at American Safety Razor’s Verona plant, where blades used for cutting carpet are produced. For people such as McCambridge, whose home value increased by more than a fourth, the county reassessment arrives with the impact of a locomotive.

Supervisors, if they felt the pain, could ease it by voting to reduce the tax rate to keep revenues level with last year, something Tracy Pyles of the Pastures District has urged but has failed, so far, to gain backing for from the other half-dozen members of the board. That would require Augusta to survive, somehow, on $43.3 million in property tax revenues. Getting by with the same or less is the task of taxpayers. Forgive them for feeling the government they fund ought do likewise.

“We’re in a recession and these guys don’t care,” DuPont retiree Jerol Kinder told The News Virginian’s Jim Sacco while waiting to appeal his assessment Monday morning. “Nobody’s even working, nobody can even find a job, but they want to raise taxes. How can you justify raising taxes at a time like this?”

Kinder wastes no words in arriving at a point elected officials are fond of ignoring. Unless they act in the manner Pyles recommends, reducing the tax rate to ensure that property tax revenues remain the same, they are, in fact, raising taxes. It matters not at all if the rate is unchanged while revenues increase by more than a fourth. That is precisely what Kinder calls it: a tax increase, and in this case, one of dramatic proportion.

Virginia law includes a windfall provision requiring that the rate initially be adjusted to prevent revenues from increasing by more than 1 percent after a reassessment. Supervisors then can vote to adjust the rate. Logic, fairness and simple awareness of the unique circumstances of our day require that supervisors leave the rate alone after the initial adjustment, which by our calculations would lower taxes from 58 cents to 46 cents per $100 of assessed value.

Housing prices likely will continue falling through the first quarter of the year, real estate agents say. That may be especially true here in the central Shenandoah Valley, which has lagged behind housing trends in the rest of the country. Pyles lobbied supervisors to delay the reassessment. Doing so for a period of six months to a year might have yielded a view considerably closer to reality. Instead, many property owners likely will be paying taxes on values higher than they can find on a market that locally has ground to a halt in recent months.

Happening also to be voters, property owners would be wise to take note of supervisors’ response to the plight the reassessment has created. Officials who cannot resist the urge to rake in more taxpayer money should be dispatched in the fall from the valuable real estate of elected office.