DeKalb County promises a second round of assessment notices will be mailed on Monday after admitting assessors failed to follow state law by not using foreclosures to set values for 2009.
But that doesn’t mean DeKalb property owners who got revaluation notices last month should ignore them.
The deadline to appeal first batch of notices, about 28,000, passes that same day. And, those notices give owners of all 28,000 parcels a right to contest their 2009 values all the way through the court system.
And, there’s no guarantee everyone who got a notice the first time will get one the second. DeKalb assessors aren’t saying what they will do. Neither the county’s chief appraiser nor the chairman of its board of assessors returned phone calls about Monday’s mailing.
Several property owners said they’ve had problems getting answers on how the county will handle the unusual situation with two rounds of notices being mailed about 30 days apart.
So, many are appealing the first notice to preserve their rights to contest DeKalb’s values for 2009.
Thomas Atkinson of Decatur filed appeals on six properties on which he received notices last month.
“I didn’t want to just trust them that they are going to do the right thing this time,” Atkinson said. “I don’t trust them to lower the values. And, I wanted to maintain my path to appeal.”
Atkinson filed real estate returns on all six properties asking the county to lower each one, claiming they are in areas with great numbers of foreclosure and distressed sales. DeKalb rejected him six times.
He said he feared any new notices mailed next week would not include his parcels or would only lower them by token amounts.
DeKalb mailed about 29,000 revaluation notices last month. Of them, about 13,500 went to properties assessors say lost value.
The county’s actions were dramatically different from neighboring Clayton, Gwinnett and Fulton counties, which each have lowered or plan to lower property values for more than 60,000 parcels.
Cobb expects to mail change notices May 22 in numbers similar to DeKalb’s first mailing. Assessors plan to send up to 30,000 notices later this month. More than two thirds will go to owners of residential properties that have declined in value. However, they say they have included foreclosures in their work.
DeKalb assessors sent a letter out with the notices saying they did not take foreclosures and distressed sales into account when setting the tax values for 2009 even though a new state law passed this year required such sales to be used.
CEO Burrell Ellis intervened after reading about the situation in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the board of assessors agreed to rework its numbers to include distressed sales.
The results of that work is in the notices DeKalb will send Monday.
Sean Casey, who lives in Kirkwood on Atlanta’s eastern edge, said he got a notice showing a $60,000 jump in value on the house he bought last year, despite the down economy. He said he expected to get better treatment in the second round of notices.
Still, he planned to file an appeal of the first notice before Monday.
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