Appellants at Scarborough assessment hearing say 2012 revaluation singled out waterfront properties; town defends method

Property owners challenging Scarborough's 2012 partial revaluation told the Board of Assessment Review on Oct. 15 that the town's approach discriminated against waterfront properties by raising some waterfront land values sharply while leaving neighboring parcels at pre-2005 levels. Appellants' counsel, Attorney Shumadine, said the cases rest on equal-apportionment principles in the state constitution and urged the board to focus on sales ratios and raw sales data rather than the state's summary "quality rating."

"This is a discrimination case," Attorney Shumadine told the board, saying his clients only seek to "pay their fair share" and arguing the assessor produced no sales-ratio analysis that shows the waterfront adjustments simply brought those parcels into line with the rest of town. He displayed state reports and local exhibits and framed three central complaints: (1) the assessor produced no comparable sales-ratio comparison for changed vs. unchanged properties, (2) the excess-land/exemptions program gives breaks to some owners that shove the tax burden onto others, and (3) the assessor's selection of parcels to revalue in 2012 was inconsistent and unexplained.

Appellants called real-estate appraiser George Kakis as an expert. Kakis said he mapped sales in Higgins Beach, Pine Point and Prouts Neck and ran ratio and paired-sales checks. He told the board he found substantial dispersion in assessment-to-sale ratios: using the state and Maria data he cited, roughly 60% of non-waterfront residential sales were within the state's 90110% range while only about 40% of waterfront sales fell in that band in the years he examined. He also said he found 22 paired sales (the same property selling before and after the Great Recession) that sold for less after the recession, which he argued undermines the assessor's claim that waterfront values did not fall. "The ratios are all over the place," Kakis testified, urging the board to examine parcel-level tax cards and the maps he provided.

Town counsel Rob Crawford and the assessor's team challenged the methodology. Crawford questioned whether Kakis's work was a valuation subject to appraisal standards and whether Kakis adjusted the comparisons for post-assessment changes such as demolitions, new construction or abatements. The town's reviewer, Bill, presented spreadsheet re-analyses of Kakis's material and said that when sales affected by non-market conditions or post-sale improvements are excluded and neighborhoods are analyzed at the appropriate granular level, the central tendency tightens and quality ratings improve. Bill and other town witnesses pointed to routine state rules for ratio studies that discard the top and bottom 15% of samples and compute a central tendency and a quality rating to assess mass-appraisal reliability.

Assessor Paul described the practical choices the office made in 2012: generally applying a 20'5% factor to waterfront land bands (and different factors for interior and condominium land), treating certain abutting lots as "budding" parcels eligible for different excess-land treatment, and using vacancy and buildability adjustments where appropriate. Paul said some parcels did not move because the local sales evidence did not support a uniform interior increase, and he explained that unbuildable lots or lots with severe site restrictions were assessed at lower percentages. "We don't assess by view," he told the board when asked about waterfront view premiums, adding that view is difficult to quantify consistently and that the office followed neighborhood and lot-specific rules in making adjustments.

Both sides agreed the board would receive simultaneous post-hearing briefs; the board asked parties to keep briefs concise (the chair suggested five pages, with 10 pages as a maximum) and set a filing date of Nov. 8. The board will not deliberate until it has received and reviewed those filings.

The hearing record includes extensive mapping, tax-card comparisons and sales-ratio tables provided by both parties. Appellants emphasized examples where adjacent lots received markedly different land-value changes after the 2012 revaluation (for example, waterfront lots increased by roughly 20'5% on the assessor's cards while immediately adjacent inland lots were left unchanged), which they say lacks a market explanation. The town's position is that the state's procedural approach and the neighborhood-level sales evidence support the assessor's adjustments once aberrant sales items and post-sale property changes are excluded.

The board set a simultaneous filing deadline for post-hearing briefs (Nov. 8) and tentatively scheduled deliberations for Nov. 26 at 6:30 p.m. No decision was made at the hearing.