 Hello, I'm Leslie McVane, the Development Director at Portland Media Center. Today I'm at City Hall with Chris Huff, the City of Portland's tax assessor. Hi, Chris. Hi. How are you today? Very well. How are you? I'm fine. And I hear you're going to do a reassessment of property. We are doing a reevaluation. You heard that, huh? Yes, I did. That's good. That means we're getting our message out there. Now why is this? The biggest reason is that Portland hasn't done a reevaluation in about 15 years. Maine Constitution says that municipalities should do this every 10 years, and so we're behind the eight ball a little bit in that regard. And also Maine has several assessment standards that every municipality should comply with, and we are falling out of compliance with those standards. So for those reasons, it's time to revalue properties in the city. So when will this be done? So the reevaluation project itself started about a year ago. It was middle of February last year when this got underway, and it will culminate with new value notices being sent to all property owners in May of 2020. New values will take effect April 1st of 2020, that's what we're solving for, property values, market value of each property as of April 1st of 2020. And what exactly is a reevaluation? So a reevaluation is a process that a municipality will do to solve really two things, Leslie. The first is it brings everybody, every property to their fair market value. Maine Constitution again says that everybody's assessed value should be what the market value of the property is. So that's the first thing that solves. And then second, it removes any inequities that have developed in our assessments, which we have a lot of, because it's been 15 years since we did one. So people are not assessed to their market value, and the level of assessment where they are in relation to their market value is not equitable. Everybody should be fair and equitable assessed fairly. So does that mean not everyone's taxes are going to go up? That's exactly right. And in reevaluation, typically, and I know this is said over and over and over again, but a third of the property owners will see their taxes go up, a third will see their property taxes stay the same, a third will see their property taxes go down. And how does that affect, I was thinking about people, elderly people who are living in the homes. They've lived in their whole lives. They want to age in place, which is a new thing that Southern Maine Agency on Aging is working on in many communities. How does it affect those people if their property does go up? So that is the reason for that question is if their property taxes go up. So that's the hardest part of any reevaluation project for any assessor, for any elected counselor and any municipality. That is the group when their taxes go up that usually is aggrieved the most. So does that go along with something that you may offer here, which would be some tax relief or tax exemption that may put them in? There are tax relief programs available. Portland does have what's called the P-STEP program. It's the Portland Senior Tax Equity Program. If you're over 62 years of age, if you qualify for the state income tax, what they call the Property Tax Fairness Credit, the city will match that credit dollar for dollar. So if you receive $900 from the state through your annual income tax that you file, your 1040 ME form, the city will match that dollar for dollar up to $900. But to get back to your question, for people that are aging in place, you know, one side of it, it's great that the value of your investment goes up, right? Your property value is increased, but that's only good when it comes time to sell the property and if your role is to age in place, well then you're left with potentially with higher taxes from a higher value, but not everybody in that situation will have a higher tax bill. And that's the important part to remember, why values for every parcel in the city are likely to increase. It's been 15 years since we've had a revaluation and many assessed values in the city are not at their market value or where they should be, they're under their market value. But not everybody is going to see property tax increases. So does this generate any more money for the city as far as? It does not. So that's a great question. Of course that's the first thing everybody thinks, if the value is going up, taxes are going up, but it's important to note that in a revaluation as the city's taxable value increases, the mill rate comes down in equal relation to that increase because the biggest key component of any tax base is how much are we raising in property taxes for the budget. So the annual budget says this is the amount needed to be raised for property taxes. If the value goes up, the mill rate comes down, but we're still raising the same amount that the budget calls for. And that just covers a portion of your budget. That's exactly correct, Leslie. Last year's budget called for raising $186 million from property taxes, and that's only 50% of the overall city and school and school budget. Now people can go online and look at what their property values are and how they've been assessed. Absolutely. So portlandassessors.com would be the website, and you can put in your address or your parcel ID number to view your property characteristics, style, all the characteristics that we track. What's the size of the property, the size of the lot, the size of the house, what style is the house, what are the amenities, everything that's on a property record card you can track online. A photo of the property, a sketch of the property. And that's again portlandassessors.com, and you can see the assessed value of the property. And if they don't like how their property's been assessed, is there any way they can appeal it? It's appeal, yeah. So there absolutely is an appeal process in the evaluation. After new value notices go out, which again that'll be towards the middle or end of May, that starts the informal appeal process. In the last revaluation there were several thousand appeals and we expect the same for this revaluation. The informal appeal process allows, it gives every property owner the opportunity to sit down with revaluation project staff and talk about how the value was determined and review property characteristics. In this project, in this process we sent data mailers to all the residential properties to say you tell us your bedroom count, your bathroom count. Here's the information we have, confirm that we have it correct or change it, correct it for us if we have anything that's wrong. So all that data goes into the valuation process for determining new values. But the appeal process allows every property owner to sit down and go over the numbers and look at sales in a neighborhood and change any characteristics. From that process, there are values certainly that will change. We're not going to have data for 24,000 properties exactly accurate. And that's the process that allows for things to change before we finalize those valuations and then of course the next step is generating tax bills for fiscal year 2021. And I think the city is doing a really nice job of putting together these lovely little brochures that explain very nicely. As I said, it looks like we're going to play a game of Monopoly here. And everybody can have access to these, they're available at the library maybe? These are available in the assessor's office. If you visit the revaluation project website at revalueportland.me, you can see a digital copy of that. In addition, we have sent several different mailings to property owners to discuss the revaluation. We've had community meetings, district meetings. We had meetings for residential property owners, for commercial property owners at the Rhine's Auditorium. And we will continue to do outreach over the project to inform residents what a revaluation is, what it is not. And thank you for the compliment on the brochures. It was very important to our city manager and our counselor that we give our best effort to educate the community and you're seeing the culmination of those efforts. Certainly when people get those notices with the new values, there's always that initial like oh my goodness, the thing to remember is the new value that you see on your property, that should reflect what the market value is as of April 1st of 2020. If you were to sell your property, that number is the city's estimate of what the value of that property is worth. Well thank you and people can call your office. Absolutely. We have a revaluation helpline that we call it, 8748763 is a revaluation helpline that is staffed by project staff and available to answer any questions at the public house. And they'll know how to find answers if they don't have them right away. Well this is nice to know that the city is helping people prepare for this and kind of go forward and the next time an assessment comes around which you're talking about shortening that time. That's exactly correct and that's a great point. Rather than these 10 year or more, it's been 15 years since our last one, we're going to shorten that cycle. There's newer technologies that are available with GIS, with aerial imagery, with our permit data that we get from our permitting and inspections department. And just with sales data in general, when a house sells and there's deeds and everything that a county registry does, we're able to utilize that data faster to generate value changes a lot more frequently than 10 years or 15 years. And shortening that cycle, we hope to move to a three or four year cycle, makes any increases less substantial when you have a long, prolonged, large increase in one shot. Doing it in a shorter time frame is just a benefit to everyone. Well thank you so much for being with us and helping us understand a little better. Thank you for coming out.