Gang just isn’t right

Tonight is the night of nights for Augusta County’s swelling legions of reassessment protesters, who are expected to descend on the Government Center in Verona as though it were a French beachhead. Six supervisors form the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc with heads as thick and countenances as foreboding as those jagged rocks of military lore. What is D-Day to the invaders is a fait accompli to the Gang of Six.

That group would prefer a response hearkening to the literature of the Great War era: The county is always right. Instead, property owners vow rebellion of a different sort.

Augusta officials are lining up extra security for the supervisors meeting tonight when a turnout of hundreds of angry taxpayers is anticipated, the hordes led by Churchville lawyer Francis Chester, the resident rouser of masses who owes more than $100,000 to the IRS, as Bob Stuart reveals in today’s newspaper. Chester will bring petitions signed by property owners demanding a rollback of the reassessment to 2005 values. If he doesn’t get it, Chester vows he’ll sue.

But Augusta’s assessors board has certified the reassessment. Expect the gang to say as much tonight in an effort to quell the dissent. Those hopes and protesters’ all may be futile.

As has been thoroughly documented in the pages of this newspaper in recent weeks, property owners are riled over a reassessment that increases values by an average of almost 28 percent over four years at a time when the area housing bubble has burst and the nationwide recession has come crashing home with a series of layoffs at major local employers.

So far, only Pastures District Supervisor Tracy Pyles has lent an ear to the howls of outrage. Intriguingly, Pyles is a lone Democrat on a supervisors board made up mostly of Republicans, but he has captured support from a wide ideological range, from people left and right of center.

That is the result, we suggest, of a compelling argument, chiefly that the reassessment numbers are flawed and that the cycle for appraisals should be extended for two years and handled in-house. Pyles further contends that the reassessment could cost the county $7.2 million in lost state education money, based on a formula that includes property values as a means of gauging local wealth. We don’t know about that one, but Pyles’ proposal to stretch the cycle and review the numbers makes sense to us.

Not so to the Gang of Six. The remaining supervisors say Pyles has failed to properly educate his constituents, those poor rubes, on the importance of allowing the process to work, the process principally entailing fattened values and more taxes, at least eventually. Having understood the necessity of the process, the Gang apparently thinks, property owners will respond as they ought, with an assenting nod like Boxer, the draft horse of limited wit in George Orwell’s 1945 classic, “Animal Farm.”

But burdens of proof rather than beasts of burden are a staple in democratic republics. Rather than expecting the conduct of the latter while ignoring the necessity of the former, the Gang ought to be concerned with ensuring that the process has not only worked, but worked properly, namely in producing numbers that accurately reflect current conditions.

To do this, supervisors would have to summon the will and fortitude to confront state code, which provides little of the flexibility locally elected officials need in rare times like these. It would be better to take that stand, shaking fists against flawed law, than to confront shaking fists over a potentially flawed assessment and expect that property owners will concede the county is right simply because the process has spoken.