Quoth Fred Foldvary: > It's more fair to have the assessments be based on > current market value of a site, excluding the > buildings. > Professional appraisers and assessors would provide a > more accurate estimate of value than one gets from > zillow.com. Assessors use maps to smooth out similar > neighboring properties. Also, a property owner could > appeal an assessment, as he now can.
"Current market value" is establishable by one, and only one, criterion -- what the property sells for. If it isn't sold, then any value assigned to it is pretty much hypothetical, although it might be narrowed down to "higher than" on the basis of offers to buy which are refused, or "lower than" based on offers to sell which don't find a buyer. I might be able to buy an "assessed value" tax if it included a requirement that the taxing entity be required to buy, at the taxpayer's option, the property at the price assessed by that entity as the property's value. I've seen a few proposals of that sort ... and I've never heard of a taxing entity being willing to put its budget where its assessment is. That's been my main problem with the whole "tax land" idea. Anything but "an acre is an acre is an acre" is going to end up being subject to the arbitrary and capricious judgments of the tax bureaucracy. No dice.
