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Commissioners adjust land valuation after local seniors appeal revaluation
Summary
After an abatement hearing in which homeowners said a mass revaluation doubled their taxes, Franklin County commissioners voted unanimously to adjust the land valuation figure at issue and asked staff to prepare formal findings and calculations.
Michael Canny and June Llin told the Franklin County Commission on June 16 that a townwide revaluation pushed the assessed value of their home from the mid‑$60,000s to about $195,900 and more than doubled their tax bill, imposing what they described as a serious hardship for two elderly, fixed‑income residents.
"There's no way our house is worth $196,000," Canny said in his testimony, adding that the town used comparable sales and a computer model without an interior inspection of his property. He said the property had been purchased as a distressed house for $25,000, had longstanding maintenance needs and that an immediate jump in assessed value should have been implemented incrementally rather than in a single revaluation.
Jessica Westver of Parker Appraisal, the firm that conducted the town's revaluation, told commissioners the company used a mass appraisal process and said assessors physically visited properties during the most recent revaluation to verify measurements and conditions. Westver said prior interior inspections (a visit in 2020) informed condition adjustments, and that cost schedules and sales data drove the updated valuations.
Commissioners pressed the assessor on specific calculations — acreage, depreciation formulas and why some same‑age houses showed different depreciation dollar amounts — and asked how the land schedule and the appraisal software produced the site and building values. Westver explained the multi‑stage depreciation and land‑value schedule used in the assessor atabase.
After hearing the testimony and questioning, a commissioner moved "that we change the land assessment to 667,200" (motion language as recorded in the hearing). The motion was seconded and the board voted unanimously to approve the change; commissioners asked staff to compute the precise numeric impact and to draft formal findings for the record. The chair closed the abatement hearing and the county will file the commissioners' findings with the record.
What happens next: staff will implement the commissioners' direction, prepare the factual findings and calculate the new tax effect for the petitioners. The hearing record shows disagreement about how the appraiser addressed comparables and depreciation; that debate informed the board's factual determination but the commissioners did not publish an expanded opinion at the meeting.
