PA--Technology Snag Hampers Assessment Appeals

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Technology snag hampers Carbon assessment appeals

With some cases scheduled this week, the county's switch of Internet site companies has left its information page off-line.

03/13/00 By DAVID SLADE Of The Morning Call

Carbon County is helping residents prepare for tax assessment appeals, but that aid will come too late for some whose cases are scheduled this week.

The first informal appeals before Cole-Layer-Trumble, the company that conducted the county's first reassessment in 31 years, begin today.

The county's tax assessment site on the Internet, where people can find information on properties throughout the county, was shut down several months before residents started receiving information on their new assessments last week.

''It should be up by the end of next week,'' Ken Lovett of Nextgen Solutions said Friday.

Lovett said the county switched technology companies more than two months ago, from Virtual Information to Nextgen Solutions, and the assessment information site maintained by Virtual Information has been down since then.

A flier on the wall of the county's tax assessment office still advertises the old site, www.carboncountytax.com.

Lovett said the new site will be at www.carboncounty.com, when it goes online this week.

Meanwhile, a printed list of property sale information, drawn from the database used on the Internet, will be available at the county assessors office today, according to technology specialist Jerry Scarpati.

Thousands of property owners have already received information about their new tax assessments, which will be the basis for 2001 property taxes.

Hundreds have already scheduled informal appeals, the first step in challenging a new assessment.

The next step for those unsuccessful with informal appeals is a formal appeal before the county's Board of Assessment Appeals, which plans to hear cases this summer.

The Internet site, when it becomes available again, will likely be the easiest way to prepare for an appeal by collecting and printing out what assessors call ''comparables.''

Comparables are properties similar to and located near one's own.

To successfully appeal a property tax assessment, the person appealing usually must demonstrate that comparable properties have lower assessments than their own.

There are several ways to collect the information, but each presents obstacles.

There are three computers in the tax assessment office in the Court House Annex that can be used to look up information on properties. But to find a property, the name of the owner or the deed book number or the parcel number must be known.

There is no way to search those computers by address, and the computers aren't connected to printers, so the information must be written by hand.

The Internet site, in contrast, will allow people to search for properties by address. However, Lovett said the old tax assessment data often does not include the street addresses of properties.

Assessment office Director David Ratajczak said people can also look for comparables in the files of transfer sheets maintained at the office, which are records of properties sold in the different municipalities.

Those files are not easy to work with, and by themselves don't appear to provide all the information someone planning an assessment appeal would need.

For example, someone living in Palmerton would have to sort through files of all the properties sold in the borough to find similar properties sold near their own that year. The transfer sheets don't describe the buildings located on properties, making them of limited use for the purpose of finding comparables.

Bob Vandermark of Cole-LayerTrumble has said the company will distribute printed lists of property information to municipal offices and libraries by the end of this month, but that's several weeks after the start of informal appeals.

He did not return several telephone calls Friday.

Randall Smith, spokesman for the county commissioners, also did not return telephone calls.



-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), March 13, 2000

Answers

Addendum to above post:

http://www.mcall.com/html/news/regional/6227.htm

-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), March 13, 2000.


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