Remove ImagesPage 2 Column
No Evidence Of Rich Stupid People Club
September 20, 2012
The News & Record is promoting a wild theory about a conspiracy to raise tax values in upper income neighborhoods in Greensboro. It is a truly whacky idea, and it comes from a truly whacky guy – George Hartzman – who has been preaching versions of his conspiracy theory for months.
Hartzman ran for the District 3 City Council seat in 2009 and is a regular speaker from the floor at City Council meetings.
Hartzman has tried hard to recruit The Rhinoceros Times into his tax-value-conspiracy-theory fold, but it makes no sense to us. First you have to assume that the Guilford County commissioners are heavily involved in the real estate revaluation process, and they simply are not. But if you accept that then you have to also assume that there is a rich property owners club where the rich property owners get together and all agree on what property values should be, and further, that every member of the club is a complete and utter idiot who understands nothing about real estate and property values. Further you have to believe that this rich property owners club and the Guilford County commissioners conspired and got the county employees in the Tax Department to commit any number of serious crimes regarding property values.
We looked into it and it all seemed a little farfetched to us. I know a couple of employees in the Tax Department and know that they are basically honest, but also that they have no intention of going to prison to help some demented rich property owner who for some inexplicable reason wants to pay more property taxes.
The theory that Hartzman and the News & Record are pushing is that the rich property owners club wanted to have their property tax values increased and right here in the beginning the theory breaks down because the main thing that is affected by your tax property value is the amount of property tax you pay. Banks don't depend on property tax value for loans. They have property appraised. And real estate companies don't price houses according to property tax value, although it is a consideration. When The Rhino Times purchased the World Headquarters building on West Market Street, we paid quite a bit more than the property tax value, and six years and one recession later I still believe we got a good deal.
The tax value is supposed to reflect the market price but it is an estimate based on comparable real estate in the area. And since the entire county is done at once, the Tax Department does not have the time to spend on each piece of property that an appraiser has. A decent appraisal costs several thousand dollars. The county can't begin to spend several thousand dollars on each of the roughly 200,000 pieces of property in Guilford County.
Rich property owners know that if the tax value of their home or office is low what that means is they pay less property tax, and, when the property goes up for sale, they get to explain that the tax value is low, so the new property owner will also get to pay less property tax – at least until the next revaluation.
But this is Hartzman's theory, or it is what it was. Hartzman has lots of theories about things and sees more conspiracies than most people. What is astounding is that he convinced the News & Record that this theory was worth a couple of front page stories.
District 5 Guilford County commissioner candidate Jeff Phillips said he learned a lesson about speaking to the News & Record. He said that in his opinion the theory of a conspiracy to artificially raise property taxes was that it was "highly unlikely." He did say that he does have questions about the way Guilford County reevaluated the property for 2012, but that the idea that there was some kind of conspiracy was farfetched.
It's Hartzman's theory that a grand conspiracy in Guilford County has raised property values in wealthy neighborhoods because wealthy property owners didn't want their property values to go down, and this also allowed the Guilford County commissioners to slightly lower the property tax rate, but the county will still collect more property tax revenue.
What seems to be overlooked is that the figure they are all concerned about is the total value of the property in Guilford County in 2012 versus the total value of the property based on 2004 values. Although the value of much of the property in Guilford County has dropped from what it was in 2008, it has to go all the way back to 2004 to drop in tax value. Building has slowed but it certainly hasn't stopped. A new apartment building at City View was completed this year, and Greenway at Fisher Park is nearly complete.