Property Tax Swindle

EACH APRIL, THE DALLAS COUNTY Appraisal District sends out about 470,000 bureaucratic beige letters to homeowners announcing the current year's proposed value of their properties. (Collin, Denton, and Tarrant counties go out about the same time). In Dallas, the letters include a statement to the effect that the district doesn't set taxes, public officials do.

That statement isn't quite true. Public officials set the tax rate. But the appraisal district sets the value of what's being taxed. Tax rates may stay the same, and politicians may brag about holding the line, but when the appraisal district is assessing values at 17.6 percent higher than the year before, taxes are going up. By doing the dirty work for the local taxing authorities, the appraisal district generates a higher tax base so that local politicians and bureaucracies have more money to spend. It is an understatement to say that they want you to pay more money each year. The system is designed to get more of your money without anyone having to take responsibility for how much you are paying.

If this doesn't sit well with you, if it seems like a perversion of how our form of government is supposed to work, you are not alone. But if you choose to fight how your taxes are levied, be aware that the system is stacked against you. Two of our editors took on the appraisal district, and these are their reports.

Nancy Nichols' Case: "Front Footage"

FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE, I FELT TOTALLY PREpared. I'd been waiting my turn, sitting for a quarter of an hour on the hard, wooden bench in the waiting room of the appraisal district offices on Stemmons Freeway. All around me, fellow petitioners were shuffling through their packets and rehears ing their appeals like amateur Perry Masons. But I sat calmly and perfectly confident in my case.

After all, I had done my homework. I knew that the district's idea that my property had soared in value over the last three years was wrong. Once I had explained this to the three-member panel that reviews such cases, I would be relieved of the extra annual $2,500 I was expected to pay in taxes. To prove my point, I was equipped with the required four copies of the 20-page booklet I had meticulously compiled of comps, plat surveys, MLS listing sheets, surveys, and finance papers. I had spent hours online examining property values. I gave myself a remedial lesson in geometry and learned how to figure square footage on an irregular lot. I had interviewed all my neighborswhose homes, as it turned out, had valuations much lower than mine. I had computed the size of their lots (bigger than mine) and done a detailed market analysis (were their kitchens updated? did they have pools? had they remodeled recently?).

I knew I had a good case, and I was sure I would win.

Things did not go as planned. During my hearing, John Geyer, the appraiser assigned to my case, had never bothered to look me in the eye. All I saw was the top of his head as he stared at his computer screen and fired bored questions at me. "The values you're presenting are all invalid," he finally said, dismissively. "In your area we use front footage to determine value."

Front footage? The appraisal district's list of "standards of documentation" for protests failed to mention this method. All my work was wasted. They had let me into the game without telling me the rules.

Here's the deal: my 50-year-old house in "Poor Man's Preston Hollow" is situated on a curve; the street front of my lot measures 100 feet across. But the back of my pieshaped lot narrows to 60 feet. Across the street, my neighbor's 90-foot frontage fans out to 180 feet in the back. But because the district uses "front footage" to determine lot value in my "area," I am charged more tax (more than twice as much per square foot) for my less than a quarter-acre lot than my neighbor is for his almost half-acre lot. And even though my neighborhood is experiencing a boom, it doesn't seem realistic that my lot value jumped 177 percent in three years, as the appraisal district claims it did. (Nobody from the appraisal district has offered to buy my house at the inflated price they've put on it.) Surely, all I had to do was point out the fallacy of these two points for my tax burden to be relieved.

The three members of the citizens review panel shuffled through my evidence and whispered among themselves. When all was said and done, they reduced my value by a scant 10 percent (which seems to be a routine gesture). It was obvious whose opinion the panel valued more. I left feeling exhausted and deflated.

Later, I reached the district's spokeswoman, Cheryl Jordan, to ask about the method of assessment. Her answer was, word for word, "It's a phenomenon, but that's the way it works." She confused me even more by adding, "The mass appraisal used by the district is not A B=C. We really rely on Realtors to establish the values."

If they rely on real estate agents, I could rely on real estate agents. I called Karen Fry, a Realtor with Briggs-Freeman, whose face is on 80 percent of the "For Sale" signs in my neighborhood. She was sympathetic.