Boards of Review throughout Leelanau County this week were preparing to hold a series of meetings next week during which local taxpayers will be given an opportunity to protest their local property tax assessment.

Board of Review members in the county’s 11 townships held their annual organizational meetings earlier this week to review and examine property tax assessment rolls presented by each township’s tax assessor. Under state law, the township supervisor serves as the Board of Review secretary. Each board consists of three additional members who are appointed by the township board for a two-year term that begins on Jan. 1 of each odd-numbered year.
CLEVELAND TOWNSHIP Board of Review members who were holding their annual organizational meeting at the township hall on Tuesday morning included Tim Stein (back left), Nello Valentine (back right), Dennis Ferguson (front left) and J. Kenneth Cerny.
Exactly when and where each township’s Board of Review will meet next week is contained in a legal advertisement on page 12 of Section 2 in this week’s Leelanau Enterprise.

In Cleveland Township on Tuesday morning, township supervisor Tim Stein was meeting with Board of Review members Nello Valentine, Dennis Ferguson and J. Kenneth Cerny, who was elected board chairman, replacing Valentine. Also in attendance was township assessor Julie Krombeen.

“I would estimate that more than half of the people who show up at Board of Review meetings do so because they are unclear about how Proposal A actually works,” said Stein, “and we end up spending a lot of time explaining it to them.”

Michigan voters approved Proposal A in 1994 during a time when property values were rising. The Constitutional Amendment stipulated that the taxable value of real property could not rise any faster than the rate of inflation – even though the true cash value of most property was rising faster than inflation up until a couple of years ago. Last year, with inflation pegged at more than 4-percent, taxable values rose by that much on many properties even though, in the midst of an economic recession, the true cash value of many properties declined. The new circumstances were confusing to many taxpayers, prompting many of them to appear before their Board of Review to protest the tax bill.

Suttons Bay Township supervisor Rich Bahle, who was also participating in a Board of Review organizational meeting as secretary on Tuesday, noted that the inflation rate this year was a negative three-tenths of one percent – meaning that property taxes for many homeowners will be going down by at least that much this year.

“I’m hopeful that the number of people who want to challenge their tax bill will at least level off from last year or go down a little because so many tax bills are going down,” Bahle said.

Other members of Suttons Bay Township’s Board of Review include Bill Klein, Jim Eckerle and Tom Nixon.

“One of the problems that people may encounter this year is that there have been so few real estate sales, especially commercial sales,” Bahle said. “That will make it difficult for people to present evidence of what the current true cash value of their property actually is – there have been so few recent sales to compare it to.”

Under state law, all properties that are not otherwise exempted from certain taxes must be assessed at 50 percent of the true cash value and must be uniformly assessed with other properties in the same classification. The Board of Review’s main job is to determine whether the official tax roll accomplishes that.

If a taxpayer believes his or her non-exempt property is assessed at something more than 50-percent of its true cash value and is not in line with other properties in the same classification – and can show their Board of Review some evidence that’s so – they stand a good chance of convincing the board to lower the assessment.

“It really is a pretty complicated system,” said Valentine. “We appreciate the fact that for the past couple of years the county Equalization Department has distributed a brochure explaining how Proposal A works in a declining real estate market. I’m sure it’s saved us a lot of time and explanation at Board of Review meetings.”