Early Beaufort County Property Revaluation Possible? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    At last night's Beaufort County Commissioner meeting, July 1, 2013, an early property revaluation was discussed. It still remains as to whether it will become a reality.

    At the heart of the matter is the inarguable fact that Beaufort County's tax valuations have long been completely out of line with what the market values actually are. This anomaly has been enforce since the last scheduled property revaluation was enacted as value on January 1, 2010. The victim of this market managed evaluation catastrophe has been the property owner, where their respective property valuation, as per Beaufort County, are no where near what is nominal fair market value.

    An example of such, as mentioned by Commissioner Hood Richardson at that commissioners' general meeting of July 1, "What we have is a question of fairness. In the last two years, we have often seen property valued by the county at 130,000.00 often selling at the courthouse steps for 30,000.00."

    Commissioner Richardson is right; in fact every commissioner that sits on this board, which are the same commissioners that sit of Beaufort County's Board of Equalization and Review (of Beaufort County's property values), have all stated that Beaufort County's current revaluation is askew with what is real to individuals there, seeking valuation relief, before that E & R Board. Rather than just giving "lip-service" to an obvious problem in that most often private meeting (it is a public meeting, however, the public, at large, generally do not attend), it is my intent to push these county commissioners to publicly, as policy, re-mediate this systemic inequity.

    Last night, at that aforementioned meeting, these county commissioners did show some small measure of intuition toward honoring these private commitments to effect property valuation change; however, not without some political trepidation by some commissioners.

    As some of these county commissioners struggled publicly to grapple with a real problem that they well understood in these pseudo private E & R meetings, Commissioner Al Klemm asked me to revise my motion for the commissioners to move forward with early revaluation to table the full motion until the commissioners could yet another dissertation from tax assessor Bobby Parker on whether Beaufort County's property values are as unreliable as I, and Hood, know them to be.

    It was at this point that Commissioner Richardson flew hot over the act of Commissioner Klemm using the Tax Assessor as a probable political stalking horse, and he even challenged me for not recognizing this his action. Once again, as Commissioner Richardson showed obvious incredulity over Klemm's probable political ploy, and my apparent acceptance of such, he was only partially right about the obvious ploy at play. What he could have not known about my acquiescence to the motion's tabling by Klemm, was my knowledge that my motion would have not passed unless Klemm was publicly shown to be satisfied with an obvious inequity, and worse, these commissioners could, and have often, shelved good motions of great ideas, for a ruled 6 month peiod, simply because they have a majority to do so. It has happened before, it will happen again, and Commissioner Richardson is well satisfied that I was right to do what I did to preserve the motion, and I am right to push forward to remedy this intolerable situation of this property valuation inequity.

    Commissioner Richardson, along with myself, will just have to wait until the next meeting in August to query the Assessor, once again, on these impossible property values at play, which we well established at last month's general meeting (on June 3), were completely out of kilter due to the abundance of forced foreclosure sales, in which Tax Assessor Bobby Parker admitted were approaching 50% of the established sales of some sectors of real property values.

    While some may consider Commissioner Richardson to be an impatient man at times, I know him to be prudent in deed and blessed with a certain foresight to understand the proclivity of events yet to occur. Some folks call it wisdom, and in this most wise aspiration of mine to correct the inequity of today's tax values of the Beaufort County tax assessments, Commissioner Richardson and I are marching shoulder to shoulder to remedy such.