By Robert Barron
When you get your property tax assessment, it’s only natural to complain about your bill.
But it takes a year to arrive at the figures, and each bill also is affected by school district levies and whether the community has a sinking fund.
Garfield County Assessor Wade Patterson said procedures in his office are a typical discovery process in assessing property.
Every appraisal follows the same procedure. Something is discovered, identified, and the appraisal steps are taken to evaluate it.
“Then, the assessment process takes it times 12.5 percent for Garfield County, less exemptions and apply the tax levy to that,” he said.
All property in the county must be evaluated by Jan. 1 each year.
“We will actually send out change of assessment notices and take renditions after that, we will still take them through March 15, but we have to act like we did them Jan. 15,” he said.
After the evaluations are done, Patterson holds protest hearings through May, then abstracts go to the State Board of Equalization and the State Auditor’s office.
When the state auditor approves the June abstract, the valuing is complete and the state evaluates public service companies in Garfield County, such as Southwestern Bell, OG&E; Electric Services and ONG. Those will be completed by the end of July, Patterson said.
The two values are added together, and local assessment, public service and eligible exemptions are removed for the final assessment.
Once the net worth for evaluation purposes is known, it is sent to school districts involved for use in their budgeting process.
Those evaluations also are used by cities who have sinking funds and county health departments. Those entities must have the assessment so they will know how much millage they will collect.
“When we send the millage levies to them they begin a budget process and send it back to the assessor, and we put it in the tax levy,” he said.
The levy is then multiplied times the taxable value of property and the tax rolls are presented to the county treasurer. That process should be done by Nov.1, Patterson said.
The county treasurer prepares the tax statements and mails them to taxpayers.
Taxpayers then have until Dec. 15 to pay the first half of their taxes.
Patterson currently has 14 employees but is budgeted for two more. Because budgets have been tight at the courthouse recently he has not filled those positions.
Patterson also is one of the first county assessors offices to have a digital photograph of every house and structure in the county.
“We have several hundred different layers in our mapping system, depending on what data you want displayed,” he said.
Patterson supplies plat books to the sheriff’s department, fire and police departments who use the maps to find property.
Garfield is one of the first counties to develop a Web site, and all data is contained online by subscription for commercial enterprises. That generates enough revenue to keep the system running and purchase new computers periodically, he said.
A recent purchase of a GPS found pipeline systems that were not on the taxrolls.
“It is a huge benefit. We found literally millions of feet of pipeline that had never been turned in. Now it is on the tax rolls,” he said.
