After putting off a townwide reassessment two years ago in Malta to let an unprecedented building boom unfold, the rural town’s overall assessment fell 22 percent below market value.
In those two years, town assessors, along with outside contractors, conducted an extensive review of the town’s assessed value. They sent out the new assessments to taxpayers earlier this month.
Now at 100 percent of fair market value, Malta’s total value has increased by $500 million, and, in some cases, people are seeing 100 percent assessment increases on their homes.
We’ve added $500 million to the total assessed value of the town through sales, new construction, adjustments for increases in (home or commercial) value and utility properties, said Malta Assessor Susan Otis.
Based on this year’s tax levies, by way of county and school taxes, very few in the town are seeing tax increases despite the home assessment increases, said Otis.
However, by law, the town can only paint the portrait of a taxpayer’s share of the levy based on previous tax levies and cannot figure in average year-to-year increases in county or school budgets. Malta has no town tax other than fire and ambulance districts.
For some residents the fear is that school budgets, as is the trend, will surely increase, and when they do, they will increase drastically when met by higher assessments.
Knowing what such an increase could mean for Malta homeowners, town officials have planned workshops and conducted one-on-one meetings with taxpayers to help them understand how the town came to the figures, said Otis.
At the first of a series of workshops scheduled to answer taxpayers’ questions about their assessments Saturday, March 8, there was standing room only in the town hall meeting room.
Many residents were irate and challenged the `outdated` form of taxing property, vowing to grieve the assessments and write their representatives.
`My parents bought it in 1978,` said Michael Gaige, 31, who owns a home at the southwestern end of Saratoga Lake in the town. Gaige is back and forth between work and the lakefront home, but it is his permanent residence, he said. He recently came back from working in the south to his new assessment.
Gaige’s home went from an assessed value of $135,000 to $310,000. Another parcel he owns behind the house, a landlocked quarter acre of wetland that had been assessed at $5,400, was raised to $39,000, he said. All in two years.
`We are getting assessed out of our homes. To me that’s zoning by economic class, and that’s why the system isn’t fair,` he said.
Gaige’s comments drew applause at the 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning meeting. At one point Gaige called the system of taxation `archaic.`
Otis and representatives of GAR Associates, the real-estate appraisers and consultants that helped the town conduct the reassessment, nodded in agreement with Gaige’s comments.
Gaige is one of many residents who have already expressed anger and frustration over the reassessments, both at the meeting and ever since the notice was mailed earlier in the month.
Otis said before the weekend meetings that the town is expecting many people to lash out at the figures, and she encourages them to so that they may understand how Malta came to the recent assessments.
`They are stretched as far as they can be stretched. Real property tax has become a burden it never intended to be,` said Otis.
Recent figures show that lower-end homes in the town are appreciating because of demand. Starter homes that had cost around $150,000 are now valued at $225,000, she said. At the other end of the scale, homes in the town’s south end, mostly in Country Knolls North, the bastion of 1960s suburban growth in the area, have depreciated.“