Melissa Bailey Photo
Ginger Nash and her new pooch Jawa won’t flee East Rock for Hamden, now that she became one of 306 homeowners who won some relief from soaring property tax assessments.
Nash owns a single-family home at 21 Anderson St., where she lives with her 6‑year-old son and three dogs.
She was among many homeowners struck by sticker shock last December as the city revealed the results of a revaluation of all city property. The unusual revaluation proved to be a gift to some, and socked others, particularly in East Rock.
Nash was one of 1,036 real estate property owners who decided to fight their new assessments before a civilian board. The Board of Assessment Appeals has finished hearing all those cases and offered a reduction to 306 applicants, chairman Jeffrey Granoff said Wednesday. (Not all of those applicants considered it a “win,” depending on the amount they were offered.)
Granoff said of the 1,036 real estate taxpayers who filed appeals, besides the 306 who saw some reduction, 605 were rejected, 22 were withdrawn, and 92 failed to show up for their hearing. The board also received 84 appeals for personal property and 15 for motor vehicles.
Nash said when she got her letter in the mail last December, she saw her assessed value jump by $31,710, up to $206,290. That’s an increase of 18 percent, which would likely have added up to a $6,000-plus tax hike over the next five years.
Nash, a self-employed naturopathic doctor, said that tax hike was too much to handle.
“I was seriously freaking out,” she said. Her son is doing well after snagging a coveted kindergarten seat at the Worthington Hooker School. She thought about selling the house she had lived in for seven years, then renting elsewhere in the neighborhood or moving to Hamden.
“I wanted to stay in my house,” she said while unpacking groceries from the Elm City Market in her kitchen Wednesday afternoon. “I’ve made my home here.”
She said she agrees that “people in East Rock should pay more” than less fortunate people in other neighborhoods, “but it got to this point of absurdity where I couldn’t afford to stay in my home.”
Nash compared notes with her neighbors. While only 9 percent of single-family homeowners citywide saw their home values rise, the revaluation hit East Rock hard, showing an average increase of 32 to 56 percent across the three parts of the neighborhood. In Nash’s immediate neighborhood, east of Orange Street, however, values didn’t rise as much.
She filed an appeal before the Feb. 20 deadline, then made her case before Chris Mordecai, a fellow East Rocker and member of the three-person, civilian Board of Assessment Appeals.
Like most homeowners who came before the board, Nash didn’t bring a lawyer. She outlined a case for unfairness, comparing her assessment to that of several nearby homes of similar square footage.
She said Vision Appraisal, the company the city hired to assess all the properties, never came inside her house. She presented a number of reasons her home isn’t worth as much as it looks. The 1,728 square-foot home is a century old. The furnace is in the attic, she said, driving up heating bills to as much as $800 a month. The chimney was in poor shape.
She detailed a number of complaints with city services, including a tree stump that was left behind outsider her house. In an interview Wednesday, she said she and her neighbors personally shoveled out Anderson Street — a side street notorious for getting plowed last—when the city failed to do so in the “Snowpocalypse” of 2011.
Mordecai’s crew mailed out decisions the last week of April. Nash found out her argument had proved effective: She saw her assessed value drop by $28,000. That means the appeals process saved her about $1,000 per year for the next five years.
“It’s going to save me thousands of dollars,” Nash said. “I’m really pleased.”
Not all the 306 property owners who won reductions walked away as pleased as Nash. Several interviewed said they didn’t believe they had “won” because the amount was so low. Granoff said he could not provide the average or total reduction achieved through the appeals.
15 Head To State Court
Taxpayers who fail to sway the BAA can continue the fight in state Superior Court. They have 60 days from the date of their BAA decision to do so.
So far, 15 cases have popped up in state court. They include several commercial appeals of properties assessed at over $1 million, which are beyond the purview of the civilian BAA’s duties.
They also include a few appeals from homeowners. For example, Gillian Roush of 177 Everit St. appealed her new appraisal of $646,000. And Victor and Marie Borellini of 648 Prospect St., whose home is valued at $301,200.
Most of these cases were filed by Attorney David L. Weiss of Cohen and Acampora in East Haven.
Weiss, who has been doing tax appeals in New Haven since 1991, said this year is unusual because of how disparate the impact was across the city. He said he received a lot of interest from East Rock homeowners, but he couldn’t always help.
“I got a lot of calls from East Rock who I had to turn away,” Weiss said, “because when you look at the comparable sales — though it was extremely hard to explain why they were paying the kind of prices they were paying in this market — there wasn’t a good basis for appeal.”
A property tax appeal comes down to a “war of appraisers,” Weiss explained. An applicant hires an appraiser to rebut the city’s math. Even in cases where a home is overvalued, Weiss said, it isn’t always worth it to go to court. Court filing fees, marshal fees, appraisal fees and attorney’s fees add up quickly.
“You have to see enough of an overvaluation,” he said, “so they get a tax savings.”
The budget aldermen passed in May reduces the tax rate from 43.9 to 38.88 mills. That translates to a tax decrease for 72 percent of homeowners, according to City Hall. Because the state legislature failed to approve a “homeowner fairness” proposal that would have softened the blow for owner-occupied homes, the city is moving forward with a full implementation of the new assessed values.
Back on Anderson Street, Nash welcomed the lower tax rate.
The relief from the expected tax hike freed her up to rescue a third dog, she said. She found Jawa (pictured at the top of this story) at a “kill shelter.”
Without the tax relief, she said, turning to her dog, “you wouldn’t have been here.”
It just seems to me that most of the people I hear complaining @ their property taxes dont actually have a hard life...Just sayin...