Time to Reduce Nassau County, Florida Property Appraisals

EDITOR’S NOTE: Contributing columnist, Steve Nicklas, expresses his views and insights on various topics of local interest (Nassau County, Amelia Island and Fernandina Beach, Florida) in Steve’s Marketplace column.

STEVE’S MARKETPLACE  ____________________

It is an inexact science — in an exact world.

Property appraisals are notoriously embedded with subjectivity, assumptions and ambiguities. But again, the practice is not held out to be a perfect science. Appraisals have many forms and applications. The appraisal done by Nassau County, Florida is used to determine the property taxes you pay. (The tax rate is applied to the appraised value to determine the assessment.) In particular, these appear to be the most arbitrary.

More than 500 formal appeals were filed this past year – protesting what property owners believed were excessively high valuations. Over recent years, the number of appeals in Nassau County have been escalating at the pace of tensions in Afghanistan.

Enough letters have been written to the Fernandina Beach News-Leader newspaper about excessive property appraisals to fill up a filing cabinet. In this case, the files would be marked with protest, and anger.

The county property appraiser’s office has also experienced internal strife. A high-ranking appraiser and a legal specialist were both removed from their duties in recent months. The grounds for the actions were somewhat nebulous.

But, as many contend, so are some of the appraisals. One subdivision of eight waterfront lots in Yulee has uniform appraisals – except for the last one. This lot is the biggest, the best, and contains a wooded buffer. However, its appraised value is half of the others.

In defense of the property appraiser, there are a tremendous number of properties in Nassau County, Florida. But this is why you hire — and maintain — a competent, experienced staff.

Appraisals are now easy to find. They are listed by parcel on the property appraiser’s website. The typical appraisal carries the following verbiage: “The assessment information is from the last certified tax roll. All data is subject to change before the next certified tax roll.”

The latter statement is the most troubling. Here in Nassau County, Florida any reductions in appraised values have seemed to be lagging other locations. The excuse has been that the appraisals are based on the preceding year. If so, the latest appraisals will be based upon the past year, when the financial crisis hit the U.S. like a tsunami. Inevitably, appraisals should decline substantially year over year.

Nassau County Clerk John Crawford has been blowing the trumpet of alarm. He clearly sees the reduction in appraised values impacting the tax revenues of the county. Other taxing entities will also be hit by the slowdown in the real estate markets.

For many residents, a reduced valuation will at least provide some relief from the escalating taxes of recent years. The property appraiser has been quick on the draw to increase valuations while the real estate market soared to new heights.

Now it is the appraiser’s responsibility to reduce the values to fall in line with the current marketplace. And public officials should avoid the temptation to increase tax rates.

Anything short of this outcome would be a travesty. So county and city residents should be on alert. A sizable tax break is coming your way — if everyone does the responsible thing.

(Steve Nicklas is a financial advisor who lives on Amelia Island. He can be reached at 904-753-0236 or via eMail at [email protected].)