The unexpected at North East’s Grievance Day

NORTH EAST — The anticipation building up to Grievance Day in the town of North East was laced with so much controversy and animosity that its actual arrival and execution was somewhat anticlimactic, according to members of the Board of Assessment Review (BAR). “We did not have a huge amount of people,” said Anne Veteran, a BAR member, noting her surprise considering “the enormous amount of flack” that Assessor Katherine Johnson received following the townwide reassessment project her office oversaw. “It was way better than we thought it was going to be and a lot less than what we heard about, and it went quite smoothly. Katherine was very organized and all the sessions went very well.”“It was nowhere near what it was built up to be. The big complainers at the meetings were not even there,” said BAR member John Crawford. “Anybody with a legitimate complaint was taken care of beforehand, as a rule. The real big-money guys, the multi-millionaires, showed up with very little substantiation, they just complained for the heck of it. “There was a very low percentage of grievances for a reval,” Crawford added. “My feeling is that Katherine Johnson did a heck of a job. She did a real good job.”The BAR, or grievance board as some refer to it, is a five-member board that hears complaints from property owners regarding their assessments. Those who do not want to go before the BAR had the option of conferring with Johnson or one of the consultants who worked on the reassessment project, in hopes of finding a resolution to their issues.A number of property owners, a majority of whom own farmland, complained to the Town Board that their property values doubled and tripled, or more. They also charged Johnson with having a bias against farmers for not paying their fair share of property taxes. It’s an accusation the assessor has denied. She has also stood by the reval project from the get go, and acknowledged while some errors have occurred, they are far and few between, and the majority of the assessment roll is accurate. She twice requested the Town Board rescind a resolution it passed requesting her to put this year’s roll aside and instead submit last year’s roll to the county. Both times the board has sidestepped the request, but so too has Johnson refused to file last year’s roll (as an elected official she is not under the Town Board’s rule).The numbersAccording to the assessor, 46 property owners appeared before the grievance board on Grievance Day, which was Wednesday, May 25; 47 property owners mailed in their complaints for the BAR to review, which is another way to go through the grievance process. In total 93 property owners in the town of North East appealed their cases before the Board of Assessment Review. Another 73 made appointments with Johnson to settle their complaints without going to the grievance board, bringing the total number of dissatisfied property owners to 166. That number is out of the town’s 1,896 total properties — that’s less than 10 percent. Johnson said statistics show typically between 20 to 30 percent of property owners are unhappy with new values after a revaluation. Considering that, she said her project went better than expected.“I was extremely happy, with the exception of people complaining,” she said, “which they have every right to do. But I think they made it sound worse than it was. I think the biggest outcry was heard at Town Board meetings, about agricultural parcels, but there were only 12 ag parcels that grieved.”That’s a dozen out of a total of 201 agricultural parcels townwide, and some of those complaints were from the same property owners with multiple parcels.“I was surprised, and really pleased with the way it went,” Veteran said. “It would have been OK if thousands came, but they didn’t. But with the way everyone was screaming beforehand I thought we were going to be bombarded.”“Everybody was complaining how much their assessments went up, but weren’t speaking about how far under-assessed they were,” Crawford said. “One guy was complaining his property went up 116 percent, but this guy had a house and 90 acres previously assessed around $300,000; it went up to $600,000-something. Now he’s trying to sell it for $1.2 million, so what is his complaint? And he never showed up to grieve.”“I think we really have to look at the big picture and get all the facts,” Johnson said. “You can see there wasn’t that big of an outcry, there were a select few that had legitimate complaints, and mistakes did happen and we corrected those. But they weren’t across the board, and that definitely shows with the amount of people who complained. “Most people were satisfied, or they were after they talked to me, with how their property was assessed, and they did not file complaints,” she added. “The whole process showed how things went and I think that was the most telling. I’m satisfied with how things turned out so that’s good enough for me.”