Senate unanimously passes property tax bill

By Ernie Suggs

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If you pay property taxes in Georgia, you would receive a county valuation notice every year and instructions on how to appeal it under a bill that the state Senate passed unanimously and sent to the House on Thursday.

In the months that Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers worked on the overhaul, he said the main theme he heard was that the system and process were broken.

On Thursday, Rogers and 53 of his Senate colleagues took a big step, they say, toward fixing it by passing SB 346, a property tax bill that would assure every taxpayer and property owner receive an annual assessment notice.

“This bill brings credibility to the process,” Rogers said. “Assessments were not keeping pace with fair market value, and if someone is paying a tax on something they don’t own, that is not fair.”

The substitute bill, which went through more than 60 revisions, would also assure that all property owners get information on when to file an appeal. Under the substitute bill, each county would now send an annual assessment to each property owner.

Homeowners currently receive a notice only when their property has been reappraised. An early version of the bill would have given homeowners a year to file an appeal. But critics of the bill felt that a year-round process would overwhelm some counties while making it hard to balance local budgets and pay for the process. In a compromise, homeowners now have up to 45 days to file an appeal.

That annual assessment notice to homeowners would include a pro forma tax bill that would use the property owner’s millage from the past year multiplied by the current year’s tax assessment. It would not include any exemptions, though.

“Simply put, many citizens are taxed far more than the value of their home, and the appeals process is often daunting and confusing,” Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle said. “Today, the state Senate took real steps to bring fairness to a broken system.”

The bill, which now goes to the House, drew wide bipartisan praise.

Sen. Steve Thompson (D-Marietta), who worked on the bill in the Senate Finance Committee, called it “far-reaching.”

“The timing is perfect for us to approach it. Maybe we should have done it earlier,” Thompson said. “The situation has been such that the majority leader has been fair, open and inclusive. I would just say — as bad as I hate being in this position — the majority leader has done a great job on this.”

The Senate’s drive to reform the state’s property tax system comes after an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last fall showing that thousands of metro Atlanta properties are overvalued for tax purposes. After studying more than 500,000 tax and sales records for five counties, the newspaper concluded that county appraisers either ignored, or failed to keep pace with, the collapse of real estate prices.

Property tax meltdown

As property values in parts of metro Atlanta collapsed during the recession, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that tax appraisers did not keep up, meaning many homeowners were taxed on value their property no longer held. See “Property Tax Meltdown” at www.ajc.com/news/.