While fighting a proposed expansion of the Epstein School two years ago, a few neighbors of the Mountaire Springs Homeowners Association got an idea for fighting their property tax bills.
This year three dozen homeowners living on two streets near the Sandy Springs private school appealed their property tax values, claiming the traffic before and after school created by Epstein parents is a nuisance to the neighborhood.
“I can’t imagine anybody who saw what happens here in the afternoon, unless they have a child in the school, would be excited about buying my house,” said Barbara Malone, who has lived a block away from the school for 12 years. “The traffic situation that is created by the cars picking up kids is a nightmare if you are tying to come or go around that time.”
Stan Beiner, Epstein’s head of school, said he believes the school is a good neighbor. The school, which eventually chose not to pursue its expansion plan, understands the complaints about traffic created by car pool lines in the afternoons.
Malone said she and her neighbors have no problem with the school, only with “the number of cars that line up on our street for the better part of an hour when school is in.”
Earlier this year Malone organized an email campaign, asking neighbors who were interested in exploring the traffic situation to lower their tax bills to contact her. Out of approximately 70 homes, 38 homeowners responded, she said. Homeowners who appealed got between a 4 and 12 percent reduction in their tax bills, she said.
“We went to the [Fulton County] board of equalization and presented our case,” she said. “And they were shocked that there weren’t more homeowners in the area with appeals.”
Malone’s county-appraised value was reduced from $336,000 in 2009 to $295,000 in 2010 and 2011, according to Fulton records.
Toni Winters, an agent with ReMax Around Atlanta who lives in the neighborhood, said she’d love to get her tax bill reduced, but she won’t use the Epstein School to do it. She is pretty confident her 2011 county assigned value of $283,600 is more than she could get for her home, but she hasn’t appealed the assessment.
“It is the economy that has impacted the value of my home, not the school,” she said.
Malone concurred property tax reductions should have come due to the downturn in the economy. But when reductions never came, she and her neighbors seized on the traffic to push their case.
“Like everybody else, we were looking for some sort of relief on our property taxes,” she said. “But that didn’t seem to be forthcoming without a compelling reason, so we looked for that reason.”
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