Trego's Mountain Ear

I wound up checking tax assessments – Dad died in 2012, and macular degeneration had taken his vision over 20 years earlier, and figuring out the buildings which were real on the assessment was an interesting challenge.  My comments in the appeal to the County Tax Appeals Board show why everyone needs to go over their data.  It also shows the casual errors that assessors make when they update the records.  It also shows that an old blind man didn’t have a chance in hell of getting past errors made by government employees doing their jobs badly.

“AAP4 – Pole Frame Building, 1 side open, wood, built 1970              Value $1,780

            This building exists, but was built after 1990

AAB2- Standard Barn, built 1960                                                              Value $4,750

            No barn exists on this tract – I believe that this is my brother’s barn, across the road from my tract, built before 1917.  I don’t believe it is just to tax me for my brother’s barn.

AAP5 – Pole Frame Bldg, 4 sides open, metal, built 1980                    Value $1,720

            No such building exists on this tract.  I can’t for the life of me figure out how this one was listed.  If you folks can find it for me, I will stack hay in it and not complain – but I really don’t want to pay taxes on a non-existent building.  I am sure you can understand.

AAP3 – Pole Frame Bldg, 1 side open, metal, built in 2018                 Value $1,790”

            I’m pretty sure this is my woodshed – though the only metal in it is the screws, nails and roofing.  No problem but we should get a better description. 

I think that AAP4 and AAP5 are the same building.  Here’s how I reconstruct the chain of events:

Dad had a guy build it after 1990, the assessor noted it as AAP4 but dated the building as built in 1970.

Buddy was working at Plum Creek in Columbia Falls, where employees could buy cull fiberboard at extremely low prices.  Dad took advantage of this, getting Bud to pick up loads of cull fiberboard – then Dad had his minions add 8 feet of fiberboard around the building.

I hypothesize that a new assessor came by, saw the half-walls on the shed, and came up with the description of AAP5 and never wondered why he couldn’t spot AAP4.

After Dad died, and the place was split, another government employee – one whose skills in property descriptions are beneath his/her/it’s salary level chose not to look at the air photo, and just set the old barn’s description on the east side of Fortine Creek Road.  Had this nameless worthy looked a bit more closely and realized that the barn is on the west side of the road, and most of my place on the east side, this mistake could have been avoided.

I have no idea of how another assessor put my woodshed on the place a couple years before I built it – but I doubt if time travel was involved.

Over in the trailer court we found another assessor screwup:

Listed under “Other Buildings & Improvements” the first building listed is

“CSH2 – Shed, aluminum built 1980                    Value $22,180”.    Then comes:

CGFF –  Garage, detached, frame finished         Value $17,880 . . . there is no detached garage, but the next entry is

CSH1 – Shed, machinery built 1966                    Value $5,160 . . . and I began to understand

CSH1 is the Butler Building that, with a frame addition Walsh-Groves built for a recreation building in 1966.  The Butler building is iron framed with walls of insulated aluminum – an ambitious appraiser chose to pick a 1980 date for its construction, and started the county into taxing this building twice, too.  It’s interesting that the building is worth $5,160 dollars in one incarnation and $22,180 in the other . . . as for the frame garage, it definitely is not detached – it’s bolted on through the Butler Building’s aluminum walls.  It’s all one attached structure.

I don’t know when the county began taxing Dad’s buildings twice – my hunch is that it was after he lost his eyesight.  My guess, with both the CSH2 and the AAP5 entries dated incorrectly as 1980 construction, and that AAP4 was dated incorrectly at 1970 that there were screwups by two (or more) separate appraisers.

Dad was blind.  I understand why he didn’t catch these errors.  Still, I wonder at the quality of a government whose employees do such things to a blind man who can’t read what they have done to him.  I’m guessing that these assessor blunders wound up with Dad being double taxed for somewhere between 15 and 30 years.

Unfortunately a blind man was wrong in trusting his government to handle things competently.  Check your property record cards – incompetence is a greater threat than evil intent.