Here is the inside word from a tax assessor working for county gov in that area, who is handling these requests. Obviously, I cannot comment on where this opinion comes from beyond that. I don’t want to get that person fired.

My read from this is that if possible you want to negotiate your tax reduction without filing an Assessment Appeal application.

My additional between-the-lines read from this is that obviously the assessors are under considerable pressure from higher ups in state and county gov to delay/prevent the tax reductions that will invariably lead to financial crisis for the state and county governments, irrespective of fact that tax reductions are warranted.

This is going to really piss off a lot of property tax payers.

“what most people don’t understand is that the values showing up on their property tax bills now were calculated as of Jan 2006. Since the market was good then, we are rejecting the requests for review stating that the value is good and the taxpayer looks at us like we just landed from mars…. That leads the taxpayer then to file a formal Assessment Appeal application and that takes up to 2 years to process, hear and resolve values issues for each year, so here we are at least 4-5 years from the tax reduction event date and the taxpayer still doesn’t have resolution on the property that has declined…..and in fact some of these properties have declined 45%”