Property assessments are dropping or bottoming out throughout the region, but hard-pressed homeowners shouldn’t hold their breaths waiting for tax breaks.
In Maryland, the assessments handed out once every three years have dropped by nearly 20 percent, one of the biggest drops in decades. Assessments in Northern Virginia, while not as drastic as Maryland, are expected to drop or bottom out as well.
But with local governments facing major budget crises, elected leaders want to raise the property tax rates to preserve revenues. They’re being careful about their proposals — promising that homeowners will pay the same amount as the year before — but the situation has some local homeowners feeling like they’re being squeezed at both ends.
“This is a racket,” said Dee Hodges, chairwoman of the Maryland Taxpayers Association, a conservative activist group. “We’re all in trouble. But why do these counties try to keep going as usual?”
John Wilson, president of the East Falls Church neighborhood association, says he doesn’t mind paying extra taxes for government service — “they’ve got to do what they’ve got to do” — but adds that he hopes the collapsing economy has taught the Arlington government to live more frugally and to plan ahead.
“If there’s a silver lining to be had, it’s that maybe we’ve learned those lessons,” he said. “But I doubt it.”
One Montgomery County man dashed off a furious e-mail to county leaders on Jan. 9, accusing elected officials of using homeowners as “a bottomless money pit” and saying that he felt “defrauded by the big spenders of the state and Montgomery County.”
“We are being run out of the state by the ever-increasing burden of property taxes,” he wrote.
Local governments count on property taxes for much of their revenue. Montgomery County relies on property taxes for about one-third of its revenue, for instance. Nearly 80 percent of Prince William County’s revenue comes from real estate taxes.
The same recession that is causing property values to collapse is causing demand for government services to explode.
“The tragedy of local of government is that we rely so heavily on property values to fund our operations,” Prince William County Supervisor Marty Nohee said. “Right at the time when the community needs the services the most is when we can least afford to provide them.”
The alternative to a tax increase is another round of budget cuts. Fairfax County, for instance, is threatening drastic cuts to its famous schools, for instance.
“Many [residents] … have said that the reason we live in Fairfax County is because they have good quality schools, they have a good police force, and we don’t want to lose those,” said David Robertson, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. “We also want to make sure we don’t lose what attracted us to these communities in the first place.”
Residential assessments
A look at the average assessments that have been released so far:
» Montgomery County: -19.4 percent
» Prince George’s County: -26.7 percent
» Arlington County: -3.25 percent
» Prince William County: 1 percent (projected)
