INDIANAPOLIS | Homes sold through bank foreclosures and tax auctions weren't factored into this year's statewide property tax reassessment, an omission some local officials say helped fuel escalating residential tax assessments.
"I think that crippled us," said Sheila Pullen, assessor for Center Township, which covers Kokomo in Howard County.
Pullen's comments came Monday at the first meeting of the Commission on State Tax and Financing Policy, a legislative panel performing a review of this year's property tax fiasco.
The evidence -- residential tax bills rising more than 35 percent in an Indianapolis and other areas -- points to more than one culprit.
But much of the blame falls to trending -- a new system of sampling recent real estate sales and crafting formulas to estimate how much property values have risen since 1999, the base year for the last reassessment.
Homeowners are seeing sharp spikes in their property values, largely because trending represents a six-year reassessment.
State officials are confident trending won't be as jarring next year, when it transitions to an annual occurrence. But Pullen and others argue this year's sticker shock would be less severe had the state allowed local assessors to factor in typically below-market foreclosure and auction sales.
"I think we need to take a look at that issue," said state Sen. Luke Kenley, R-Noblesville. "There may be some expertise in the assessing community at large -- the private one, as well as the public one -- that questions whether that's a legitimate decision or not."
Many more suggestions were made at Monday's seven-hour commission meeting, with the crowd -- initially of more than 200 -- applauding whenever a speaker advocated abolition of property taxes -- the funding source for more than $5.5 billion in local government services in Indiana.
Joe Gomeztagle, an instigator of the St. John lawsuit that brought about the state's much-reviled 2002 reassessment, was in attendance Monday. And attorney John Price, author of a similar lawsuit filed two weeks ago in Marion County, said the state's property tax system is "on a collision course with extinction."
"Our system is so far from fair and uniform that there will be another (successful) lawsuit," Price said.
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