Brewer and Lee read prepared questions for DOF: published list and thresholds
Brewer and Lee begin reading questions they would have asked DOF, covering why the 900,000-property published list differs from the 17,000 notices, reporting requirements under state law, and why finance didn't filter the list using statutory market value thresholds before publishing.
Thank you very much.
And now we're going to, as quickly as possible, read the questions that would have been asked of the Department of Finance and the Tax Commission.
I'm going to start with number one, and we will go back and forth, Chair Lee and I.
So the public list on the website, which we all heard about, has 900,000 residential properties,
the ones below the market value criteria established by state law, while the list of properties that received notices included 17,000 properties, as we have heard.
And these are the questions.
Why is the list of properties receiving letter notices and the published property list different?
Is the published property list information similar to the publicly available property tax assessment roll data that finance publishes as required by the state property tax law?
What are the reporting and public notification requirements based on state law?
What are they?
State law requires the phase one market value records of covered properties to be open for public inspection.
While separately requiring finance to make initial non-primary residence determination for properties that meet the applicable market value thresholds.
Can you explain how finance interpreted and implemented these two separate requirements?
Does finance believe that its current public reporting and notification process satisfies the requirements?
They were satisfied.
requirement established by state law and are there any changes finance plans to make to that process going forward there were certainly a lot of suggestions here today
the public list posted on finances website indicates the properties on the list may or may not be the subject to the tax
How can owners verify if they need to file an exemption?
According to analysis by former Finance Commissioner Martha Stark, a beloved person to all of us,
when the more than 900,000 properties on finance's published list are filtered using the statutory market value thresholds,
Approximately 24,000 properties remain.
Why didn't finance apply those thresholds before publishing the list so that the public facing list more clearly reflected the universe of properties that could potentially be subject to the tax?