New Haven Independent

Branford is now preparing for a new reval, the first with a full physical inspection since 2002. There was a reval in 2004 based on statistics but not inspection. DaRos was first selectman at the time of the 2002 reval, when prices for waterfront property soared, doubling, tripling and quadrupling property taxes. No improvements were made to these properties.

What changed were the sales that happened around them. And it is the sales of homes at a particular time that determine the market value of one’s home and one’s land. These days land is more important than homes. Some reval companies actually determine the market value of a home based on the premise that it will be torn down. This has happened in Guilford.

So DaRos knows well the perils of revalution. In 2002, the town’s grand list jumped by $700 million to $2.72 billion, a 33.5 percent increase. It turned out that 5 percent of Branford’s residents, those living on the shoreline, paid 95 percent of the additional taxes raised in 2002. The 2002 reval also showed the inadequacy of the town’s own appeals process. DaRos says he plans to change the way the Board of Assessment Appeals functions.

“I want these things taken care of in town, not in court,” he said.

DaRos decided not to run for office in 2003. When he ran again in 2007 he dealt with the reval issue head-on. He said he would investigate having the assessor’s office perform the reval “in house” if need be. He was, and says he still is, concerned about a reval process based on secrecy. A reval company has “proprietary” rights to protect its package. This legal concept prevents the taxpayer from knowing how a reval company derives its figures, even though those figures are based on a town’s public records.

The first selectman also promised that the reval would be “transparent,” that he would have citizen input early in the process. He has now done so, appointing five Branford residents to a committee. In May they gave DaRos their 9-page single spaced analysis of the town’s RFP’s or Request for Proposals that companies use to enter bids.

The reval bids will be open a week from today, on Friday, July 18, in DaRos’s Town Hall office at 3:30 p.m. Barbara Neal, the town assessor, told the Board of Assessors at a meeting this week in her office that she expects about five companies to submit bids.

The citizen committee is led by Janice Gruendel, who with other concerned taxpayers discussed the reval issue with DaRos during his election campaign. She wrote publicly of her dissatisfaction in April 2003, expressing her dismay with the reval process, its subjectivity, its failure to provide answers. Gruendel raised questions about the reval company, the face of the 2002 process. But while Vision conducted the reval, it is the assessor, Neal, who has the final word.

Gruendel’s committee report (click here to read it) expresses concern about whether the 2009 RFPs will offer taxpayers transparency and openness. It takes issue with a provision that might permit the assessor to depend upon sales earlier than 2006, a time period that is near to the height of the real estate explosion. Actually after the three year period, state law only permits assessors to look back in three month intervals for sales.

One key issue is how Vision went about determining the factors and multipliers for “neighborhoods,” not the geographic neighborhoods in Branford but the 38 assessor defined neighborhoods. Eventually Gruendel and her husband sued the town.

The committee recommended eliminating neighborhood designations, which can double, triple or quadruple the value of a homeowner’s land. In addition, in 2002 Vision assigned each property a “C” favor, which represents a home’s specific “condition” meaning its actual, unique water view. The C factor multiplied the unit piece of land from 150 for a partial water view to 450 for an “ocean” view, though the term “ocean” does not generally apply to Long Island Sound. This view factor is subjective, determined by the company employee sent out to inspect. Many say the combined multipliers led to a grossly unfair system of taxation.

DaRos took the committee’s concerns seriously, Gruendel said. He also sent their concerns and comments to an outside expert to analyze before the town sent its RFPs out to bid.

The expert turned out to be Frank J. Buckley, Jr., an appraisal expert from Niantic, who most of the committee members had never heard of. He observed that in the end, the assessor, not the reval company, sets the standards, perhaps suggesting that the committee ought to address its concerns to Neal.

Buckley, a member of the state’s Real Estate Appraisal Commission, has impressive credentials. He also has a long history with the town. He was integral to the 2002 reval. He also worked on the 2004 statistical reval. He is often in Town Hall, meeting with Ms. Neal; some insiders call him the phantom assessor. Indeed, he and Neal signed the 2001 and 2002 grand lists. His state license is higher than the one held by Neal. He is a CCMA II, she is a CCMA I.

Records show that soon after her appointment in March, 2001, Branford hired Buckley to serve as Neal’s consultant. DaRos said he first hired Buckley as a town expert when the town sued (and won) a lawsuit against another reval company that gathered inaccurate information and failed to complete the reval. The town spent $334,465 for Buckley’s services through October 2004, records show. He left soon after Cheryl Morris took office as first selectman in 2005.

The Eagle asked DaRos if he thought Buckley could be objective in his analysis since he was essentially commenting on the aftermath of his own work in the 2002 and 2004 revals. “I think he can. If I didn’t think so I wouldn’t have used him,” he answered.

He said Buckley will play a far lesser outside role in this reval. “When I have a question I will call him. I expect him to know where we are as the reval progresses. I will look at the results and answer concerns about the process.”

One of the committee’s concerns centered on “neighborhoods and views.” In the end Buckley rejected the committee’s analysis on this issue.

“Neighborhoods have always been reliant on the assessor’s final approval. Appraisers must consider and delineate neighborhoods in their valuation process. To ignore neighborhood factors would be a violation of USPAP,” he wrote. USPAP stands for Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice, the appraiser’s bible.

DaRos understands the 38 neighborhoods issue, a number that could go higher or lower in 2009. “I have a problem with neighborhoods,” he told the Eagle in an interview. “Some towns can do without it but these are basically towns that are inland, where everything is the same. Here… the structure, the location, is so different. The condos, the mobile homes, the single families, the railroad areas, the turnpike areas, the water. It is so much different than inland. All the shoreline has this problem, not just Branford.” And that, he said, is why a mass appraisal is necessary. To evaluate each piece of property individually would be wildly expensive, he added.

One major difference between 2002 and now is that the town is far advanced in its technology. “In 2002, we had no information. It was zero. There were arbitrary numbers used in 1980 and 1990. I think there were bad revals during that time.” Looking back, DaRos said, “I did not expect the revolt from where it was. I expected the revolt from inland. They were over-valued and the shoreline was under valued in the 1970’s and 80’s. The shock was more than most people could bear.”

DaRos’s plan for the 2009 revaluation centers on delivering information to the public through the use of public access television (BCTV) and a new reval website. He wants the public in the loop at every stage in the process and he says the town’s data base is working very well. “I want to be at the front end of this,” he said.

It is not clear if the citizen group will continue to have input during the reval process. For the time being, DaRos has thanked them for their service.

As part of retooling the process, DaRos says he will overhaul the Board of Assessment Appeals, a three member panel. He wants to add additional members to the Board. The Board came under severe attack for the way it handled the hundreds of appeals that came before it, beginning in 2002.

Faced with severe time constraints that are built into the process and tend to undermine it, the Board was only able to assign a case to one of its members, who then made a recommendation. The full board spent less than 30 seconds on each case.

“It was wrong. The way it was handled was wrong. I went and read the manual on this,” DaRos said. He added that he now considering appointing a citizen panel to conduct a first review of the appeal, but he wasn’t sure yet.

He said he would meet soon with the three member appeals board. “I will visit with them and tell them my concerns. Number I: the town is holding all the cards. And you are here to represent the people. When the people come in with a bona fide appraisal for their property, it should not be dismissed out of hand. This is their defense. They should be listened to.”

What DaRos and prior first selectmen know is that once these tax cases go to court they cost the town gobs of money. Some cases and their legal fees are covered by town insurance; some are not.

One tax case, “William and Dawn Massey v. the Town of Branford,” is now in its fifth year and is no longer covered by town insurance. The Eagle has written about this case in the past.

At the heart of this case, which has also sought to overturn the town’s grand lists, is the fact that the Massey’s home was designated “custom,” a term that greatly increases a house’s taxes. The “custom” category has produced a number of lawsuits. It is not yet known whether the assessor plans to make it a part of her 2009 reval.

So far the Massey case, brought by pro-se litigants, has reached five different courts, involved seven law firms, taken the expertise of more than a dozen outside and inside town lawyers and cost the town in excess of $250,000 to defend. The plaintiffs are not attorneys.

Getting this case resolved? As the commercial says, “Priceless.” Shelley Marcus, the town’s former counsel, came close. But so far it hasn’t happened.
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