Norfolk officials not aware of assessment lag

Or so they say in this article, which appeared in Sunday’s Virginian-Pilot.

Norfolk considered sales from July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008, for its most recent batch of reassessments. Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk used data from Jan. 1, 2008, through Dec. 31 – six months later than Norfolk. Virginia Beach cuts off sales the first week in December.

Mayor Paul Fraim, like many other council members, said he hadn’t realized that Norfolk’s process puts it behind.

“I thought we were in line with our neighboring cities,” he said.

I understand that Council can’t know every little detail about everything but I would expect that they would know the basis for the city’s largest revenue source. And given the fact that real estate assessment have been in the news for the last five years or more, it seems that they would be aware of the assessment process. (I believe the latest cutoff data is actually an improvement. As I mentioned in this post,  when I served on the Board of Review for Real Estate Assessments, the lag was 18 months, with a cutoff of December 31 of the year before.)

But the bigger question is why is this news?

Real estate Assessor Deborah Bunn said newer data wouldn’t make that much of a difference in assessments – a contention backed up by numbers from the rest of South Hampton Roads.

Residential assessments fell 4 percent in Virginia Beach, 1.8 percent in Chesapeake, 1 percent in Suffolk and less than 1 percent in Portsmouth.

So Norfolk’s decrease of 1.35% is in line with what the other cities are reporting, even with newer data.

No one complained about the lag when assessments were running behind fair market value. During the four years that I served on the aforementioned board, not a single person came forward and asked that their assessments be increased.  The lag was beneficial then, just as it is detrimental now. (The Pilot reports that housing prices in Hampton Roads fell 13% last year.) So what’s the point of this article? Just to make our Council members look bad? I don’t think they need any help in that regard.

At the root of the problem is the Dillon Rule. I’m not going to rehash what I’ve said many times before. Just once I’d like to see The Pilot write about the real cause of so many issues in our city instead of this non-story junk.