By GEORGE CHANDLER
Assessor
Los Alamos County

1. 1. 1. 1. The bill aims to bring valuations of non-residential properties up to statutory and equitable standards while minimizing the impact of these increases on property owners.
2. Having valuations accurate ensures equity in property taxation. The tax rate in each county, municipality, school district, and other taxing governmental unit is determined by dividing the budget requirement by the sum of valuations in the district. The amount of taxes paid by each taxpayer is then the tax rate multiplied by their valuation. You can do the math: If some taxpayers valuations are too low, it means the tax rate for the whole district goes up, the tax paid by fairly assessed taxpayers increases while the tax amount for the taxpayers with low valuations is reduced.
   
3. For historical reasons, these valuations for non-residential properties (commercial properties like big boxes, factories, etc.in some counties have fallen to as low as 40 – 60% of market value. This means that non-residential taxpayers valued at full market value are subsidizing those non-residential taxpayers who are at low valuations. Because of the requirement that residential and non-residential rates be the same (with some exceptions), residential rates must also increase and residential taxpayers may be subsidizing non-residential taxpayers in the same district. 
4. The principal reason is that County Assessors do not have reasonable access to the data they need to accurately value non-residential properties. The cure for this problem is to require all sales of non-residential property to be reported to the Assessor. There is already such a statute for residential property, and in most counties these properties are assessed from 80% to 98% of their market value.
5. Without a new disclosure law, assessors are required by statute to bring values up to current-and-correct immediately. This would result in large tax increases for these properties, possibly crippling existing business plans and  likely resulting in hundreds or thousands of protests with the attending very high legal expenses for both the assessors and the property owners. To avoid this, the Equitable Disclosure bill includes a graded cap on increases that brings values up to current-and-correct over a period of years.
6. There are other items in the bill, which is just beginning its legislative journey and is subject to revision, that are unrelated to the disclosure problem: We will not discuss these here.

This bill will make the property tax system more fair and equitable for every class of taxpayer. 

Please contact your legislator and urge them to support it.