An education consultant thinks the Loveland City School District Board of Education has a good chance of getting a tax hike passed next year because school officials have a reputation for good stewardship and residents have a solid grasp of fiscal realities.

What part the continuing investigation of treasurer Jill Manville, now on administrative leave, will play in the process is unknown, Roger Effron of Madeira told the school board at a recent special session about whether to ask voters to approve a levy that would generate the revenue needed to offset expected costs.

But, “I’m a strong believer in what levies boil down to is confidence in the school district and a good campaign,” Effron said.

On Nov. 27, the school board agreed to meet Dec. 4 to consider a vote on the issue, with most elected and appointed officials seeming to favor a property tax hike of 7.5 mills for the March ballot. That would give the district a year-end balance of about $5.6 million in fiscal year 2009 - which begins in July 2008 and would be the first year of collecting the new money - and a good three years of breathing room.

“I think we need to go out in March, that we need to run that campaign, and we need to win it,” Superintendent Kevin Boys said.

Some board members said they feared voters who’ve had to tighten their belts at home and on the job would react unfavorably to a requested tax hike over 7.5 mills.

Other school officials said the district would do well to explain that the schools - just like families and businesses - have been hard-hit by inflation in costs such as fuel.

Communications Coordinator Meg Krsacok said the district’s diesel fuel costs from July through November during the 2004-2005 school year were $67,715. and rose to $111,447 during the same time period in 2005-2006. The comparable number for this school year dropped to $96,468.

She credits that to replacing old buses when possible with new, more fuel-efficient buses, making fewer stops along bus routes and eliminating two routes altogether.

http://news.communitypress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071203/NEWS01/712030345/1111/RSS1117

 

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Homeowners who were stunned last month by sky-high property-tax revaluations: Be glad your home isn’t Crabtree Valley Mall or Wachovia Capitol Center.The 1.3-million-square-foot Raleigh mall was notified that the 2008 tax value of its biggest parcel is $403.7 million — almost 2 1/2 times its previous value.

For downtown Raleigh’s Wachovia tower, the Triangle’s most spacious office building, it is $150.5 million, up 117 percent.

Commercial real estate values, fueled in recent years by a surge in rental-property investment, rose 57 percent in Wake County’s latest tax assessment.

Wake residential values, by comparison, rose 37 percent in the once-every-eight-years study of all county properties, completed last month.

For homeowners, big bumps in value could mean paying hundreds of dollars more in taxes. But for commercial landlords, tens of thousands of dollars are at stake.

And so begins a duel between the landlord and the tax man.

Landlords want minimal operating costs so they can charge competitive rents or pocket more revenue for investors and shareholders.

Tax officials, meanwhile, must make sure they’re not shorting taxpayers. Property taxes make up half of Wake’s budget. And about 28 percent of property taxes come from the commercial side.

The values of at least 40 percent of Wake’s 16,500 commercial properties are expected to be appealed before Wake’s Jan. 1 deadline, Wake Revenue Director Emmett Curl said. Of those appeals, nearly half are likely to succeed, often whittling 4 percent to 8 percent off the original assessments, he said.

Commercial property owners and tax assessors will quibble over a complex formula that includes variables such as comparable sales, potential rental income, redevelopment potential and location before they agree on a fair price.

“You want to make sure it’s fair — particularly when it’s your primary business,” said Jeff Sheehan, a senior vice president at Duke Realty, which owns 4.7 million square feet of office and industrial property in the Triangle.

Several of the Indianapolis company’s Morrisville properties almost doubled in assessed value, property records show.

“That’s meaningful money,” Sheehan said.

An appeal that reduces a $20 million assessment by 8 percent, for instance, would reduce taxes by about $10,850, based on 2007 tax rates in Wake and Morrisville. Wake has not yet set its 2008 rate.

Seeking an edge

That kind of reduction could give a landlord a competitive edge. Taxes and other operating costs are often passed through to tenants.

If costs push rents too high, landlords run the risk of incurring reducing returns or having tenants run to a competitor.

“If that’s 8 or 10 cents [per square foot in annual rent] my competitor could do and we couldn’t because we were lazy and didn’t do the math, that hurts in the long run,” Sheehan said.

That’s why real estate investment trusts such as Duke and rival Highwoods Properties of Raleigh hire people whose sole job is to examine assessments across the country and appeal them when they seem out of line. In other words, they do the math.

That’s what Amy Hudson has done for Highwoods for the past eight years.

Hudson is the company’s manager of property tax. From an office in Rock Hill, S.C., Hudson opens envelopes representing the buildings in Highwoods’ 3.7 million-square-foot Triangle portfolio.

She analyzes each building, matching square footage, comparable sales, age, rental income, building height, replacement cost, land value, zoning against the county’s records. She is armed with a 241-page county document, the “schedule of values.”

Hudson will do this every day for the next few weeks, looking for anything off target. She’s prepared to drive appeals to the state level, if necessary.

“Whether we’re looking at electricity or janitorial services or paying taxes, we want bang for our bucks,” Hudson said. “That eventually is going to translate into pricing — what we require from our tenants — and ultimately what we return to our shareholders.”

Not everything would be appealed. Discrepancies have to be pretty sizable for an appeal.

Indeed, nickel-and-diming can work against a company, particularly if outside consultants or lawyers are involved, Hudson said. And there’s a perception issue.

“We know how taxes affect a community,” Hudson said. “That’s beneficial to everyone, and we want to pay our fair share.”

http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/806638.html

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Michael Hagen won at least $36.7-million in reduced property assessments in Lee County last year, trimming 16 tax bills by $588,000. Gary Appel haggled $35.8-million off the value of the upscale Loews Hotel on Miami Beach, saving $715,000 in taxes. Gregory Orcutt got $38.4-million lopped off the property assessment of GL Homes in Tampa. Savings for the big developer: $844,000.

Call them tax consultants, agents, brokers or representatives (tax reps for short). By whatever name, they share a goal: shave their clients’ property assessments - and city and county property taxes - as much as possible.

Tax reps can be mom-and-pop accounting firms with a post office box. They can be blue-chip lawyers with political clout. Or they can be promoters who hawk their tax-reduction services on the Internet.

At public hearings and - more often - behind the scenes, these hired guns dicker with county property appraisers in an appeals process marked by back scratching and slack oversight.

Florida relies heavily on property taxes for schools, police and fire protection, roads and other vital services.

Yet no state agency oversees tax reps, who number in the hundreds, or tracks how much they manage to cut each year from property tax rolls.

“It’s a game and it can be extremely lucrative,” said Tim Wilmath, director of valuation in the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser’s Office. He was once a tax rep himself.

Some reps make up to 50 percent of any tax savings they achieve. Others charge up to $450 an hour. Some make a lot of money. Others don’t.

Because the big money is in high-end commercial property, many tax reps are reluctant to take on single-family homes unless they’re worth at least $1-million. Many less affluent homeowners don’t need a tax rep anyway; they have “Save Our Homes,” which caps the amount their assessment can rise from year to year.

To help gauge the size and influence of the tax rep industry, the Times reviewed records of some property assessments that were lowered on both real estate and business equipment in 19 of Florida’s 67 counties last year. Comprehensive data was available for only six of those counties. Many others don’t track tax reps or provided information in outdated forms that made it hard to analyze. The Times also found glitches in the computer data provided by some counties.

While limited, the Times review found:

-Many of Florida’s largest companies used tax reps. In just two counties, Home Depot lowered its bills last year by $134,000, real estate conglomerate CNL by $303,000 and Walgreens, by $398,000. Sprint Nextel got $183,000 in reductions in three counties and Publix, $414,000 in four.

-The top five tax rep firms in the Times review got at least $1.8-billion in value chopped off property rolls in seven counties last year. That translated to about $36.1-million in tax cuts. The top five are Property Tax Consultants Ltd., a partnership based in Hallandale; Berman Rennert Vogel & Mandler, a Miami firm specializing in real estate law; the firm run by Gary Appel, a lawyer and real estate broker in Miami; Marvin F. Poer & Co., a national property tax specialist based in Dallas; and the property tax division of Deloitte & Touche, the giant accounting firm.

-If reps were baseball players, their batting averages would get many of them sent down to the minors. Some larger tax rep firms obtained tax breaks in fewer than one in five formal assessment appeals.

-Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county, had the most assessment reductions, by far. That’s where Macy’s, McDonald’s and building products titan Rinker Materials each reduced their tax bills by more than $600,000. That’s also where the family business of former Sen. Bob Graham used five reps to save $294,000 and the enterprises of singer Gloria Estefan and her music producer husband, Emilio, used one to save $8,000.

-Among celebrities who pared their taxes with the help of reps: former Miami Heat center Rony Seikaly ($22,000 on a $7.7-million house in Miami Beach); talk show host Jerry Springer ($37,000 savings on his $3.6-million home in Sarasota); billionaire businessman H. Wayne Huizenga ($59,000 on his $12.5-million home in Fort Lauderdale); and Kay O’Rourke, daughter of a founder of Winn-Dixie Stores ($174,000 on a ranch in northwest Hillsborough County).

For the little guy

In interviews, tax reps play down their big business ties, saying their goal is to keep all taxpayers from overpaying. Some say the appeals process is tilted against them. Others portray themselves as tax rebels fighting for the little guy against an oppressive government.

“What’s more fundamental than ‘no taxation without representation’?” said Appel, 45.

Tax reps say they understand the state’s arcane property tax procedures. By noodling through technical details, they say they often find faulty appraisals - from erroneous comparable sales to incorrect building measurements. Or they take advantage of loopholes, such as farmland deductions that can dramatically cut property owners’ taxes.

For the Loews Hotel, part of the corporate empire built by the billionaire Tisch family, Appel supplied information about the economics of the building: its income, occupancy rates and value of comparable hotels.

His arguments persuaded a hearing examiner to slash the Loews assessment, but it still paid about $4.7-million in real estate taxes, $2-million more than in 2005.

Appel won’t say how much he was paid on that deal or any other. He saved hundreds of property owners more than $4.5-million in four counties last year.

In June, some of Appel’s clients on Miami Beach’s ultra-expensive Fisher Island drew criticism from a union trying to organize the island’s low-wage workers. The union issued a scathing report showing how some workers’ property assessments increased more quickly between 2002 and 2005 than some Fisher Island owners.”The rich who can afford the reps get the breaks. The working poor pay more of the taxes,” said Rick Smith, a union representative.

Cows and horses

The industry got its start in the 1920s, when oil and gas companies complained that they were paying more than their fair share of taxes. Some property tax managers at oil companies left to start their own consulting businesses. Texas soon became the epicenter of the tax rep world.

As Florida’s property taxes rose, the industry gained a foothold here in the late 1970s. Some of the new firms were staffed with former property appraisers’ employees who knew just what it took to keep tax bills low.

Among the first to switch sides was Al Blake, Miami-Dade’s property appraiser in 1970-1979.

“I was at the point I was working for 50 cents on the dollar,” said Blake, 81. He denies any inside edge. In fact, he says, some of his former colleagues “resented it greatly” that he changed sides and made it even tougher on him.

Then there’s Michael Hagen, 48, a Fort Myers lawyer and real estate broker. For nine years, he was counsel for the Lee County Property Appraiser’s Office. He fought against property owners who abused agricultural tax breaks by planting a few palm trees or renting a few horses or cows in an effort to get or preserve an agricultural designation for their land, which means much lower taxes.

In 2003, Hagen left the appraiser’s office. He kept fighting, this time for the landowners and for the tax breaks.

One afternoon in August, Hagen appealed for agricultural exemptions for six property owners, including Premier Island Group, a real estate investment firm. He told special magistrate Lori L. Rutland that Premier qualified for an exemption (worth about $90,000) because it operated a horse breeding business on 15 acres.

The land, which is zoned for commercial development, had been leased for $10 to a cattleman, Steven Game. Game testified that he kept five horses on the property.

But the appraiser’s office portrayed it as a rent-a-horse facade. And the hearing examiner rejected the exemption, noting the property had no stalls or barns for horse breeding.

That setback aside, Hagen and his firm, TaxCuts1, are doing very well. At formal hearings in Lee County last year, he saved at least $588,000 for property owners like Alico Industrial Park in South Fort Myers and DiamondHead Beach Resort in Fort Myers Beach.

While county appraisers say they give no special treatment to former-employees-turned-tax reps, that doesn’t stop the reps from trying to gain an advantage. Some contribute to political campaigns. Some join trade groups. Some lobby for lower taxes or rules making it easier to win reduced assessments.

Yet only a few tax reps break into the highest income bracket.

“You can make a good living, but I’m not going to retire next year,” said Gary Strong, 45, who runs the one-man Tampa office of Fellers, Schewe, Scott & Roberts.

Last year, Strong won at least $355,000 in tax savings for clients like Palm Harbor’s Lansbrook Village, Tampa Palms Shopping Plaza and Prudential Insurance Co. in Miami. He got reduced assessments for almost every appeal petition that he filed in six counties.

That’s in stark contrast to many reps, who lose far more appeals than they win.

In fact, according to the Times review, some reps appear to do no better in formal hearings than property owners who appeal on their own.

The spaghetti strategy

Tim Wilmath, Hillsborough County’s valuation director, was earning between $80,000 and $90,000 a year from the county when he crossed over to what he jokingly calls the “dark side” in 2000. He was wooed to Deloitte by the prospect of making $300,000 eventually. But Wilmath was back at his old job within a year.

“The problem I had with the work is that you basically had to exaggerate to achieve reductions,” said Wilmath, who now earns $137,000. “Money isn’t everything.”

Because many tax reps need just a few big wins a year to earn a decent living, they go for volume. Some recruit clients by sending out mass mailings.

“We remain committed to smart, aggressive property tax advocacy to help ensure that you do not pay one penny more than your fair share of taxes,” says a letter sent in August by lawyer Jeffrey Mandler.

In seven counties last year, Mandler’s law firm, Berman Rennert Vogel & Mandler, sliced more than $11-million off tax bills of clients like Apartment Investment and Management Co., the nation’s largest owner and operator of apartment communities.

After signing up clients in droves, some reps swamp appraisers’ offices with appeals petitions that can be frivolous. In what some property appraisers call the “spaghetti strategy,” some reps throw a potful against the wall and hope that some of it sticks. Other times, they withdraw petitions at the last minute or fail to show up for hearings. The Times found several instances where more than one rep filed appeals last year for the same property.

“Have you heard of the term ambulance chaser?” Roger Alejo of the Lee County Property Appraiser’s Office asked. “We’re being swamped with sillier and sillier arguments.”

A little horse trading

Like some lawyers who appeal assessments, Gregory Orcutt doesn’t consider himself a tax rep. Founder of a now-defunct law firm that handled work for the Hillsborough Property Appraiser’s Office, Orcutt obtained one of that county’s largest tax savings last year: about $844,000 for builder GL Homes.

At the appeals hearing, Orcutt said the developer was growing Bahia grass on more than 1,000 acres, entitling it to keep an agricultural designation. The Property Appraiser’s Office argued that only a fraction of the site, which is zoned for development, was a sod farm. Special magistrate Catherine Teti sided with Orcutt.

“It isn’t anything that was shocking or out of the ordinary,” said Orcutt, 58, declining to comment on how much he was paid. GL Homes “went through the proper procedures. … That’s the way the system is supposed to work.”

Orcutt’s case was unusual because it was decided in the open before a special hearing examiner. Most cases are settled at “informal conferences” or “off the record” sessions between tax reps and county property appraisers.

Reps write, call or sail in and out of appraisers’ offices, and in some counties, they lobby the same tiny group of employees who tend to value the same properties year after year.

They negotiate and sometimes do a little horse trading. “They try to get reductions on two or three of their petitions in exchange for withdrawing the rest,” said Wilmath, adding that his office rejects such deals. If the staff makes a mistake, they fix it, regardless of who brings it to their attention, he says.

In 1990, a statewide grand jury criticized county appraisers for changing assessments, without documenting the reasons, when property owners complain at informal conferences.

Today, the paper trail for such “counter changes” is still thin. In Pinellas, for example, the Property Appraiser’s Office does not keep records of meetings between staff members and tax reps. A reporter was told to dig through stacks of pink papers in a storage box to determine why a particular decision was made.

Lax oversight goes beyond the informal conferences. Florida doesn’t require tax reps to register or report lobbying activities or expenses. The state has no “revolving door” or “cooling off” rules that bar former employees in property appraisers’ offices from contact with ex-colleagues for one or two years after leaving public service.

http://realtynetworth.blogspot.com/2007/12/to-pay-less-property-taxes-hire-soldier.html

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Their disproportionate share of the property tax load compared with homeowners is driving many businesses in Vancouver and Toronto to consider either moving from the city cores or closing up shop, according to business advocacy groups.

In Vancouver, businesses pay five times as much municipal property taxes as homeowners, and Toronto isn’t far behind, according to a study by the Real Property Association of Canada (REALpac), which works on behalf of real estate owners and managers. Vancouver now has the “dubious distinction” of being the most overtaxed business jurisdiction in the country on this basis, the organization said in commenting on the study results.

“Smaller businesses in competitive markets are getting hammered by these taxes. I don’t know how they [the City of Vancouver] can justify having them pay five times the taxes when they don’t use five times the services. In fact, many use fewer services, and even pay for their own garbage collection,” said Laura Jones, vice-president of Western Canada for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

“People love their little neighbourhoods with their bakeries and other shops, and many of those businesses are now leaving or threatening to leave. If they do so, then residents will also suffer.”

Municipal spending in Vancouver has risen dramatically, and businesses can’t afford to foot the bill through higher property taxes, Ms. Jones said. At the same time, residential taxes haven’t gone up nearly as much.

“Part of the problem in Vancouver is high house prices,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of REALpac. “They think they can ameliorate the hit by, in essence, keeping property tax increases for residential homeowners low.

“The problem is they’re going to drive away business.”

Of the 19 cities included in the study, Vancouver has had one of the biggest jumps in the amount of municipal property tax shouldered by businesses compared with residences between 2004 and 2006. By contrast, Toronto appears to be narrowing its gap slightly, pushing it down to a ratio of just under five to one, a move in the right direction, Mr. Brooks said.

Moreover, the city has pledged to narrow the gap even further to a ratio of 2.25 to 1 within the next 15 years, a much more balanced ratio given that businesses can afford to shoulder a bit more of the property tax burden because of writeoffs, he said.

However, even if Toronto does follow through on this plan, it will be too little too late, said Sandy McNair, president of Altus InSite Real Estate Information Systems Inc.

Despite Toronto’s commitment to curb urban sprawl by encouraging denser development in its core area, high property taxes have driven businesses to the suburbs in droves over the past 10 years.

In that time, 14 million square feet of office space in 121 new office buildings have been built in the outlying 905 area code district, an increase of 56,000 office workers, he said. By contrast, the 416 area code in Toronto proper has grown by three million square feet. The difference between realty taxes in class A office space in the downtown core compared with the 905 area is about $12 a square foot a year, or the equivalent of $12 per employee per work day.
“Toronto was a world-class city but they’ve squandered that and fallen behind in many areas including investment in transportation infrastructure. Here’s an example: Before worrying about making Union Station pretty, maybe they should concentrate on finally building a high-speed rail link to the station from the airport,” he said.

Much of the problem comes down to politics and the fact that its highly unpopular with voters to raise taxes on homeowners, he said.

“It’s a rare politician who will say that house taxes are too low, and the reason that offices and shopping centres and hotels have ridiculously high taxes is that they don’t vote,” Mr. McNair said.

Vancouver also has been edging toward change, and business groups there are working with city council to try to divide the tax burden more equitably between businesses and homeowners, said Bernie Magnan, chief economist at the Vancouver Board of Trade.

“We can’t ignore it, or it’s going to drive out business and there will end up being no jobs for people to go to,” he said. In the past two years the city has shifted more than $24-million in property taxes from business to residential, he added.

Unlike Toronto, Vancouver business owners appear to have no neighbouring jurisdictions to move to in which property taxes are much friendlier to corporations.

Mr. Brooks said he fears Vancouver could end up losing some of its head offices to friendlier tax jurisdictions in other provinces, such as Calgary and Edmonton, which ranked much better in the REALpac study as the country’s second- and third-friendliest cities in property tax terms behind St. John’s.

Asked to name a tax-friendly city in B.C., Ms. Jones suggested Prince George, known as the province’s northern capital, 780 kilometres north of Vancouver.

Rather than simply shifting property taxes from one category of taxpayer to another, Ms. Jones said city governments also need to be responsible for keeping their budgets in check.

“In Vancouver, from 2000 to 2006, spending was double the rate of population and inflation growth combined. That is simply not sustainable over the long run, and they have to do a lot more to control their spending.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071204.PRTAXES04/TPStory/Business

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But the question you ought to be asking yourself is whether you should be loading up your IRA with real estate.

A few years ago, when the housing market was booming and everyone saw real estate as a can’t-lose strategy for building wealth, buying “sticks-and-mortar” real estate (i.e., actual buildings as opposed to REITs, real estate mutual funds or other securities) within IRAs was all the rage.

Indeed, a slew of advisers and investment firms were pushing everything from condos to single-family homes to commercial properties as ideal IRA investments. And a number of financial publications ran stories that made it seem as if you were an old stick in the mud if you weren’t beating the bushes for a sweet real estate deal for your IRA account.

Of course, now that home prices are tanking and the people who followed the advice of the rah-rah real estate crowd have presumably seen the value of their IRA accounts plummet rather than soar, you don’t hear as much about the virtues of devoting IRA money to real estate.

So what’s my stance on this strategy?

Well, I was skeptical of it during real estate’s heyday, as you will see if you read the Long View column I wrote on this topic back in the summer of 2005. And I still don’t believe it’s a good idea for most people even now.

Granted, now that house prices have come down since their boom peaks, you can argue that the potential long-term returns for investing in real estate are higher now than they were just before the housing bubble burst.

But it’s not as if all’s clear on the real estate front. Given rising home foreclosures, stricter standards for getting home loans and the general economic malaise, it’s likely that house prices will continue to fall for some time. (For more on the prospect for real estate prices, see MONEY’s December forecast issue.)

So even if I were inclined to devote some of my IRA’s assets to real estate, I certainly wouldn’t feel that I have to rush to do so. But even putting the timing issue aside, I still have plenty of other reservations about putting actual real estate into an IRA.

One is that the various regulations governing real estate in IRA accounts can be a pain in the…neck to deal with. For example, all the expenses of acquiring, owning and maintaining real estate in your IRA must be paid from IRA funds as opposed to personal accounts.

So if your IRA doesn’t have the wherewithal to cover, say a big assessment from your condo association, a spike in your insurance premiums or a large repair bill and you have to pay the tab from your own resources, you could be hit with a penalty for making an excess contribution.

And although you’re permitted to hold virtually any type of real estate within an IRA - residential, commercial, even raw land - there are still plenty of restrictions. You can’t use your IRA to invest in a house or other property you already own or, for that matter, to buy a beach house or country home that you would also use for vacations.

Run afoul of these and a number of other “prohibited transactions” - which are spelled out in IRS Publication 590: Individual Retirement Arrangements - and the penalty can be severe. In a worst case, the IRS could disallow your IRA, which would trigger taxes on the entire account value, plus a 10 percent penalty if you’re under 59 1/2.

One more thing. You say you plan to pay cash for these condos. That’s good, because buying real estate for your IRA with borrowed funds can be a hassle.

Since rules prohibit you from personally guaranteeing a loan against IRA assets, you must convince a bank or other lender to give you a “non-recourse” loan that’s secured by the property itself. That’s possible, but it can lead to other complications, such as your IRA owing tax on “UBTI,” or unrelated business taxable income - a tax that also must be paid from IRA funds.

There are ways, of course, to navigate these obstacles. Indeed, a dozen or so IRA custodians that specialize in alternative investments like real estate are more than willing to help you do it (for a fee of course).

But even if you’re willing to deal with all these issues, there’s still the very important question of diversification. Unless you’ve got a very large IRA (or plenty of other investments outside your IRA), plowing $85,000 into real estate could leave you dangerously dependent not just on one asset class, but on the prospects for that asset class in just one location, the east coast of Florida. I’m an advocate of spreading risk, not concentrating it.

Bottom line: I have nothing against adding a little real estate exposure (say, 10 percent or so of assets) to your IRA or other investment accounts, as long as you’re doing so as part of a long-term diversified strategy that includes rebalancing your portfolio each year.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/30/pf/expert/expert.moneymag/?postversion=2007120312

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The idea behind the program was to revitalize four areas of Gainesville, Heward said: College Park and University Heights, Eastside, Fifth Avenue and Pleasant Street, and downtown.

The program was intended to last for 20 to 30 years, she said.

“Once a few projects are in the area and that area’s starting to revitalize, that’ll encourage other people to come in and do the same on their own,” she said.

If projects met criteria, the Community Redevelopment Agency would determine how much funding the project would receive based on a point system.

After the project was completed, the Community Redevelopment Agency would pay the money by reimbursing a percentage of property taxes over 15 or 20 years. The percentage came from the difference in the property taxes after the completion of the project and the original property taxes.

http://www.alligator.org/articles/2007/12/04/news/local/corners.txt

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Paul Womack summed up the feelings of many DeKalb County residents who packed a hearing Tuesday night on whether a special tax district should be created to improve the area around the jam-packed intersection of North Druid Hills and Briarcliff roads.

Womack, a former county school board member, worried the tax district would only help clear the way for a controversial $1 billion mega-project planned by the Sembler Co.

“Why should the taxpayers have to fund Sembler’s expansion?” he said to applause.

DeKalb Commissioners Jeff Rader and Kathie Gannon, who represent the area, want to create a 417-acre tax district around the intersection to help pay for road improvements, new sidewalks and parks in an effort to ease congestion, create a more walkable community and accommodate new development.

County commissioners learned Tuesday that the proposed tax district may not bring in as much money as initially thought — $56 million over 25 years, not $65 million.

Ken Bleakly, a real estate finance consultant, told commissioners at a committee meeting that his earlier estimate was too optimistic.

But the TAD could generate considerably more revenue if the area is rezoned to allow for denser development.

Tuesday’s hearing, which drew about 150 people, was required under state law that allows local governments to create tax allocation districts, or TADs.

Many urged commissioners to oppose a TAD. A vote could be as soon as Dec. 18.

“We need our tax dollars spent to keep our neighborhood viable,” said Flo Wolf of the Merry Hills Homeowners Association, the area in which Sembler plans nearly 2 million square feet of stores and offices, plus 3,700 condos, apartments and townhouses. “Let developers pay to make their developments viable.”

Some people spoke in favor of the TAD. Liz Beyer said residents were too focused on the Sembler plan to realize how the TAD might help the entire area.

“I have worked so many years cleaning up this stretch [of road],” said Beyer, a North Druid Hills neighborhood leader. “We have tried for years to get funding for sidewalks. If we took Sembler out of the conversation tonight, there would be elation … at finding a solution for the traffic out here.”

County Commission taxes would generate about $15 million, while school tax revenue would contribute $40 million, Bleakly said.

But schools historically have opposed TADs on the grounds that they divert money from education.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/dekalb/stories/2007/12/04/dektad_1205_web.html

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The fear among some is that a declaration of blight - and subsequent approval by the city of a redevelopment zone - is a strategy to lure a large, out-of-town developer who would turn South Lake Tahoe into a cookie-cutter community filled with chain stores.

“They basically want to rip this town apart. They call it redevelopment - I call it turning it into Anytown, USA,” said Mick Clarke, one of the organizers of a movement called Fight the Blight. The effort is a project of the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Government, a group working to influence the decision-making of local government and agencies.

Clarke claims that a preliminary blight study presented to the city council in September includes outdated photos, and that sites portrayed as blighted have since improved.

For example, a building described by the consultant as vacant with overgrown weeds has since been refurbished and relandscaped, Clarke said. Other photos in the consultant’s report are misleading or manipulated, he contends.

But South Tahoe Redevelopment Director Eugene Palazzo said that’s not the case.

“The bottom line is that no photos were altered to make them look worse, the captions were not misleading, and certain details were not forgotten,” Palazzo said in a letter to Clarke.

Of 31 photos in the consultant’s report, 27 were taken in July, and five were taken in April 2005, Palazzo said. And the report was a preliminary document to help the city council decide if it wanted to move forward with a detailed blight study, he said.

Citizens Alliance President John Runnels said he also was dismayed by a statement allegedly made by Ernie Glover of GRC Redevelopment saying a large redevelopment area is necessary to attract a deep-pocket developer.

Glover’s alleged comment came during an October meeting of the Planning Commission in response to a question on why the potential redevelopment area couldn’t be broken down into smaller pieces, Runnels said.

“We don’t want to see more corporations taking over and the Vail-ification of South Lake Tahoe,” Runnels said last week.

Glover said he didn’t recall making such a statement. He said that in general, redevelopment areas aren’t financially feasible if they’re too small.

Palazzo also said he didn’t recall such a statement coming from Glover at the meeting. And he couldn’t think of anything the consultant said that could have been interpreted that way.

A tape of the Planning Commission meeting was not available in time for this article.

The city council in September approved paying $186,000 to GRC Redevelopment Consultants to study the area and determine if it meets the requirements for establishing a redevelopment zone. A finding of blight is among the requirements, as is the determination that conditions can’t be reversed by the city, the private sector or both working together.

Redevelopment is a way to help local governments pay for improving blighted areas. As the areas are revitalized, property values go up, and redevelopment law allows the agencies to keep most of the increased property tax revenue.

The city already has one redevelopment zone: the Stateline/Ski Run area adopted in 1988.

Any new redevelopment zone would have to fall within the boundaries of the area now being studied by the consultant but wouldn’t necessarily include the full study area.

The study region includes the “Y” area at the intersection of highways 50 and 89. The “Y” area also has been under study through development of what’s called the Tahoe Valley Community Plan. That plan also has generated some concern, particularly in regard to an option that calls for buildlings as tall as six stories.

The plan has not yet been finalized. An environmental review is being conducted of its various alternatives.

Another question that redevelopment skeptics are asking is why a is redevelopment zone necessary when there are several recent examples of property owners revitalizing their property without the help of redevelopment. Remodels of the Fox gas station and Safeway, along with the new Genasci and Stigers dental building, are examples.

Palazzo said a redevelopment zone would fund infrastructure projects such as storm drains, erosion control, street repairs and lighting.

Businesses, residents and property owners in the study area will be receiving brochures in the mail in coming weeks explaining what’s happening in terms of the potential redevelopment area, Palazzo said. They’ll also be invited to a meeting to discuss the proposal.

Realty Tax Consultant

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Property taxes on Chris and Danny Wielandt’s Egg Harbor City home increased tenfold to $5,300 since they purchased their Buffalo Avenue home in 1976. And so, in what has become a classic New Jersey tale, they moved.

They left in May for a house in Concord, N.C., which is twice the size of their old one - with about one-fourth the property taxes. They regret nothing.

“New Jersey has made it very difficult for you to live there, especially if you’re on a fixed income,” said Chris Wielandt, 62, who, with her husband, Danny, receives Social Security income and two pensions.

It is an anecdote that is a standard feature in gripes about New Jersey, and it has become the subject of one real estate firm’s amusing pitch to do more business.

“Who is the next person you know who would like to sell their home and leave the high expenses, taxes and congestion of N.J.?” reads the postcard, citing the Wielandts’ story. The Keller Williams Realty Jersey Shore recently sent these postcards out to about 800 homes.

“I hear it from a lot from people,” said Richard Haviland, a broker salesperson at the Absecon office. They mainly are retiring empty-nesters who have lived here for decades, he explained, and, “unfortunately, many of them they feel like they’re just fed up with the New Jersey taxes, the real estate taxes.”

Haviland estimates that the portion of his business derived from people moving out of state has increased from 5 percent to at least 10 percent over the past five years. The postcard was one of the monthly pitches Haviland’s company sends to residents on its mailing list.

Whether you find this funny or disarming, it is a phenomenon backed by numbers. A Rutgers University study last month revealed 72,000 more people left New Jersey than moved in the last year, costing the state about $680 million in tax revenues.

In a 2005 ranking of state and local property tax collections per capita by state, the Tax Foundation awarded New Jersey first place for having the highest taxes per capita in any other state.

“We had to go where we could get the most bang for our buck,” said Chris Wielandt, who had been vacationing in North Carolina for 13 years. She retired as a special probate clerk at the Atlantic County Surrogates’ Court; her husband was coordinator of housing maintenance for The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Haviland said clients have varied complaints but, “Number one is taxes. … The taxes have gotten more so in recent years.”

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Sstill hanging in the Supreme Court is the so-called Maysilo estate case, running for almost 50 years now, putting on edge hundreds of thousands of residents of Malabon, Caloocan, Quezon City and Valenzuela.

Remember that the case involves 300 hectares of land in those cities — on which stand thousands of houses, hundreds of factories, government buildings, large universities, malls, and a good part of the North Luzon Expressway.

A group called CLT Realty is claiming the 300 hectares, the ownership of which has long been exercised by the Manotok group, the Araneta family, and thousands of ordinary folk.

Earlier, the Supreme Court in effect ruled in favor of CLT Realty, when it affirmed the decision of the lower courts on the case, saying that the Supreme Court was not a “trier” of facts.

The government then intervened in the case because of the state properties falling under the claim of CLT Realty. The Office of the Solicitor General subsequently presented to the Supreme Court proof the CLT Realty title was a fabrication.

Thus the Supreme Court is now reviewing its earlier ruling.

Just which way it would go, is surely being watched by the thousands of residents of those cities.

In one subdivision, the Santo Niño Kapitbahayan, for instance, about 450 families will be directly affected by the Supreme Court ruling.

The University of the East, Gregorio Araneta University-De la Salle and Manila Central University (and their 20,000 or so students) may also have to relocate.

Also to be affected by the Supreme Court ruling are the Grand Central, Araneta Square, Bonifacio Market, Victory Liner and Pure Gold.

It may even threaten the real property tax systems of the four cities, since businesses will have to abandon their sites to give way to the claim of CLT Realty.

Moreover, the Supreme Court ruling may spill over to the rest of the Maysilo estate, which actually covers some 1,660 hectares of land.

That means that the number of families to be affected by the high court decision may run to more than 300,000. It is going to be that messy.

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