Fulton sending new tax notices to all but three cities

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By Johnny Edwards

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Taxpayers could have to shell out as much as $140,000 so that Fulton County can mail new property assessment notices, correcting mistakes in hundreds of thousands of tax bill estimates sent earlier this month.

Phil Skinner, pskinnner@ajc.com "There's nothing wrong with the assessments or the appraised values," says Fulton's chief appraiser, Burt Manning. "The assessment notices are correct."

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New notices will go not just to the Atlanta property owners who got grossly inflated estimates, but to those in all Fulton cities except Sandy Springs, Johns Creek and Chattahoochee Hills. They also will not go to owners in unincorporated South Fulton.

Fulton’s Board of Assessors decided on the re-mailing Thursday after Chief Appraiser Burt Manning told members that, along with giving Atlantans tax estimates thousands of dollars too high and listing last year’s homestead exemption countywide, initial notices also left out municipal tax estimates in ten cities.

The assessors office generated the estimates using calculation tables from Tax Commissioner Arthur Ferdinand’s office. While Ferdinand collects county taxes countywide, he only collects city taxes for Atlanta, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek and Chattahoochee Hills.

Of those, only Atlanta received the bloated tax estimates, the result of a commercial solid waste charge that wormed into the figures on the “total estimate” line.

About 235,000 new notices will be sent -- or about 70 percent of those initially mailed -- hopefully beginning next weekend, Manning said. For those who receive them, the 45-day deadline to appeal will re-start.

Manning, who pegged the cost at up to $140,000, said he is unsure where the money will come from and that he’ll ask County Manager Zachary Williams for help in identifying a source. Still undetermined, he said, is whether the county will be totally on the hook, or whether software provider Tyler Technologies Inc., will be pursued for any of the cost.

For the first time Thursday Manning pinned blame for the over-estimates on Tyler, which sold Fulton the program that generated the notices, iasWorld, in a 2009 contract for $355,000. The commercial solid waste charge should have been applied only to some Atlanta properties, but it wound up in the majority of Atlanta estimates’ bottom lines. Manning told the board Thursday that even if his staff had accounted for the charge and keyed in the correct information, the program still would have factored in the sanitation charge.

“They’re partly at fault, we’re partly at fault,” he said.

A spokesman for Tyler has referred questions about the flawed estimates to Manning. The spokesman did not immediately return messages Wednesday.

Fulton commission Chairman John Eaves wrote an e-mail to Manning on Wednesday telling him he wants to know who’s at fault -- the assessors office or the company. If it’s the latter, Eaves said he expects it to pay to send out correct information.

“We need to restore confidence in Fulton County residents that their tax assessment notices are accurate,” Eaves said.

Barbara Payne, executive director of the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation, questioned the wisdom of another mailing. She prefers the assessors office save money with public announcements saying the tax estimates are wrong and that correct bills will arrive later in the year.

“I can only hope that what they’re doing will be absolutely correct,” Payne said, “and given what we’ve been putting up with for years from that assessors office, I’ll believe it when I see it.”