The Klickitat County Assessor wants you to know that while property values in the county have soared—some by close to 70 percent or more—your taxes will not necessarily proportionally raise.
In an interview last week, Assessor Crista Shroder said home properties have indeed skyrocketed in recent years, and yes, the increases in some areas have been downright astonishing. But county assessments, she pointed out, still remain based on willing seller-willing buyer: what price will a seller and buyer agree on and finalize? The property value increases reflect what sellers and buyers agree on as a purchase price, which can be wildly disparate from past valuations.
And that still doesn’t mean taxes will soar. There are limits on those.
Many people recall something about a 1 percent allowable increase in taxes each year. “For district’s budgets,” Shroder says. “It’s a little bit more complicated than that. If they haven’t asked for that every year, they can go up a little bit higher. Statutorily it’s 1 percent over last year, plus new construction plus any increase in state assessed. That’s pretty much the only way that taxing districts can increase their budget. They can go higher than the 1 percent if they have the banked capacity. If they had new construction for a couple years in a row and they didn’t ask for it in the past, they can ask for it at a later date. But typically for the taxing districts it’s 1 percent over last year. That was a voter approved initiative, I believe in 2001.”
Shroder cites an assessment of four homes at $100,000. “If we were to increase assessments, if we were to double them—so we took a $100,000 valued homes, and the sales presented us now at a $200,000 home, then that makes those four homes at 800,000. If that was the total district with the 1 percent increase in the budget, and an increase in new construction and state assessed, that makes the district at $434. So if you use the $800,000 and the $434, it gets you 0.05. So then once you take that, that’s the rate you take that you multiply it by, their $200,000 assessed value home, and it’s $108.50 in taxes.
“So the point that I want to make,” Shroder emphasizes, “is even if your home were to double in value, your taxes are not going to double. They’re not going to be proportionate to that.”
Shroder cites additional models of assessment value increases and the math behind their taxation. Across the board, there is not necessarily a proportional increase in taxes. Across the county, Shroder hopes there will be a huge collective sigh of relief. Her office has received a lot of nervous inquiries about this. So has The Sentinel; one woman from Snowden called worried that her home assessment rose 68 percent in a single year. That was brought to Shroder’s attention, and she was well aware of the situation and the concern. She emphasized again it doesn’t mean the person’s taxes will proportionally increase; they won’t go to the point of matching the annual gross product of Fiji.
So is there any formula people can use to anticipate their taxes? “Not at this time,” Shroder says. “Right now we are at the very, very beginning of the levy process. We’re doing levy classes with the DOR [Department of Revenue]. We do those every year to make sure we’re up to date on any legislative changes. Then we’ll send the taxing districts their numbers. We’ll send them out their district values and their last year’s budgets and help them with the math on what they can do. And then they start having public hearings and start setting their budgets, which they turn into the county. The board of county commissioners then certify them to us. And then with all the other numbers that we get from the state, we start our levee process, usually the last couple weeks of December, and it goes through January. So at this time, the only thing that I can state is, an increase in value doesn’t mean a proportionate increase in taxes. Beyond that, there is no frame of reference to anticipate what that tax is going to be.”
So it’s good news and foggy news, to coin a new frame of reference. Your newly assessed value doesn’t mean you taxes are going to blast off. But you’ll also have to wait a bit to see what those taxes will be.
