Cochise County assessor seeks $50,000 for fee appraisers, warns new exemptions and proposed ag bill are shrinking local tax base

Cochise County’s assessor office briefed the Board of Supervisors on April 16 about budget needs and valuation trends that officials say are reducing the county’s tax base.

Presenter Bill Lind told the board the assessor’s office is requesting about $50,000 to create a professional-services line to hire contracted fee appraisers so the county can “go into court with a level playing field” in tax litigation. He described the fee appraiser as a contract hire, not a permanent staff position, and said the line would be used case by case.

The office also asked for a CoStar commercial-market-data subscription to improve commercial property appraisals. Lind said the subscription would cost roughly $500–$600 a month, or about $6,400 a year, and would be entered as a funding request into the budget if approved.

Phil Blind Decker, Cochise County’s assessor, provided context on valuation trends and recent legislative impacts. Decker said the county’s 2026 full cash value rose about 1.8 (roughly $245 million), but the legislature’s reduction of the class-one assessment rate (from 16% to 15.5% for 2026) cost the county approximately $10 million in net assessed value.

Decker warned a newly enacted 100% service-related disability exemption is removing significant property value from the roll. “There’s 147 so far that we’ve processed,” he said, citing sampled property values removed from the roll (examples the assessor listed included $364,000, $375,000 and $750,000). He said the exemption continues for a surviving spouse who remains in the home and described the change as an unintended consequence with material fiscal impact on local taxing jurisdictions.

Decker outlined recent Department of Revenue activity and litigation risk. He said the state issued an equalization order alleging valuation dispersion; after discussions with the department’s attorney the county explained local-sale-price dispersion among many low-value vacant-lot sales, and the department withdrew the order. The assessor also noted Cochise County has a pending Arizona Supreme Court case on orchard and vineyard valuations and urged the board to monitor potential legislative responses to a favorable court ruling.

Board members and staff discussed House Bill 2261, which Decker said was vetoed by the governor. He described the bill as written to change how agricultural improvements would be valued—requiring valuations based on lease amounts—and warned that would be “absurd” in practice because lease data do not exist for many dairies, orchards and other specialty agricultural properties. He said Riverview Dairy’s 2026 full cash value example (about $267 million) illustrated how much value statewide legislative changes could affect.

The assessor reported internal staffing issues—36 authorized positions with eight vacancies—and described recruitment and retention challenges. The office also said the five-year limited property value used for tax levies increased about $479 million (a 4.4% increase), which partially offsets some losses to the roll but does not eliminate the fiscal effect from exemptions and legislative rate reductions.

No formal board action or vote was taken during the work session; supervisors asked follow-up questions about Cochise College’s assessed value and the potential economic effect of a new port authority or truck-stop/warehousing development on the tax base. The assessor offered to meet separately to discuss college transportation and campus impacts. The board scheduled the next meeting before adjourning.

Why it matters: local governments rely on property-tax levies tied to assessed value. The assessor framed recent statutory changes and exemptions as reducing the taxable base available for county services and highlighted modest budget requests aimed at defending valuations in court and improving commercial-valuation data.

Authorities referenced during the session included a Department of Revenue equalization order and a pending Arizona Supreme Court case (court decision pending), as well as the vetoed House Bill 2261 (state bill). The assessor’s office provided numerical details on assessed-value changes, sample removed-property values and staffing vacancies during the presentation.

What’s next: the board did not vote on funding requests during the work session; the assessor indicated the $50,000 professional-services line and the CoStar subscription would be processed as funding requests for future budget consideration.