NORWICH – The New York State Board of Real Property Services has released annual equalization rates for Chenango County’s municipalities.
Except in cases where towns have completed a re-evaluation, a few percentage point changes over the past two years means rates remain flat, said Chenango County RPTS Director Steve Harris.
The values are used by the state to determine each town and the City of Norwich’s county and school tax rate for 2012. They are based on a combination of town assessors’ data and actual property sales within each town (or if not enough said sales, then inventory data from across the state) from June 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010.

2009 2010 2011
City of Norwich 60.00 66.00 68.00
Town of Afton 57.72 64.00 61.00
Town of Bainbridge 52.90 100 100
Town of Columbus 41.00 100 105.29
Town of Coventry 100.00 100 100
Town of German 45.75 45.00 44.50
Town of Greene 100.00 100 100
Town of Guilford 52.00 57.60 100
Town of Lincklaen 60.00 61.00 64.00
Town of McDonough 69.20 75.00 77.57
Town of New Berlin 84.50 86.00 100
Town of N. Norwich 59.00 63.00 66.00
Town of Norwich 50.31 51.59 52.00
Town of Otselic 43.50 46.00 48.10
Town of Oxford 59.00 63.00 67.00
Town of Pharsalia 59.50 54.23 54.72
Town of Pitcher 44.00 47.50 49.00
Town of Plymouth 51.21 53.50 55.00
Town of Preston 41.77 42.00 44.00
Town of Sherburne 71.00 81.50 82.50
Town of Smithville 66.30 63.30 66.50
Town Smyrna 66.62 62.00 65.00

County supervisors weigh in on valuations
Reassessing properties to bring equalization rates up to 100 percent across the board, as the towns of Bainbridge, Columbus, Coventry, Greene, Guilford and New Berlin have done, does not automatically result in higher taxes and does not determine the town or city’s tax rate itself. Equalization rates come into play when determining county and school taxes.
The main reason for a reval is to create equity in the rolls and for people to pay an equal share, said Harris, who has spent the last three years in his job as RPTS director, helping towns and the county move toward more fair and consistent levels of assessment.
“Usually when towns are at 40, 50, 60 percent of value, there’s a possibility that people’s homes and properties within the same town aren’t equitable, but not always,” he said.
Each year at budget time, Finance Committee Vice Chairperson Dennis Brown, D-Pharsalia, challenges the need to bring rates up to 100 percent, however. By doing so, towns that have low equalizations are unfairly compromised, he says.
Brown usually argues further that towns with substantial acreage in state-owned forests, such as Pharsalia, Otselic and German, have no control over their values and can’t re-assess fairly. New York can and does change the value of their land. The same is true for public utilities, etc.
But the Pharsalia supervisor’s complaints aren’t shared by all. During budgeting season for 2011, he told members of the Finance Committee that because Bainbridge and Columbus did reassessments, it actually cost all county taxpayers. Pitcher Supervisor Jeffrey Blanchard, who rarely speaks at committee or board meetings, retorted: “But, in years past, you haven’t been paying your fair share.”
Weighing in on Brown’s forest land argument is former Coventry Supervisor Janice O’Shea, who lost her long-time government position in 2009 in part because her constituents believed a reval had caused their taxes to go up.
“Towns do have some control over values of state-owned land – towns can make the decision to have a reval forcing the state to revalue their land same as rest of property in town. It is a town’s decision to not reassess,” she said.
Another concern is sales. Land developers, as was the case with Christmas Associates, Inc. a few years ago in German, have sometimes paid up to four times the local market price for land. Sales made for natural gas speculation also fall into this category. Many supervisors agree that there’s a problem with the state using sales inventories from areas outside of the area in order to get statistics from what they say are comparable properties.
But assessors have options within real property tax laws that “can blunt” the effect of development or speculative land purchases on other assessments, O’Shea said.
As O’Shea knows, completing a reval project is a risky undertaking for public officials. Former Columbus Supervisor George C. Coates, who reassessed properties when he was in office and is running for supervisor again, said he has often asked to explain the complicated process to his constituents.
“I go around to people’s homes and they’ll start in about the reval. What they don’t understand is that the reval in itself didn’t bring up everybody’s taxes, spending in the budget raised taxes,” he said.
As a rule of thumb, according to Harris, property taxes will stay the same for a third of the people; go down for a third; and go up for the remaining third.
Coates said the theory held true for Columbus, too.
“Those that went up meant they weren’t paying their fair share before,” he said. “Our town’s value went from $25 million to $60 million. That tells you right there that we had a problem.”
Exemptions are going to be of more value if the equalization rate is closer to 100 percent than to, say, 60 percent. This is especially true for agriculture exemptions. Coates stressed that those who have agricultural exemptions on their taxes aren’t getting the full value when rates aren’t kept at full value.
“We should be helping our farm community,” he said.
Also, where revals are 20 years old or more, when properties change hands, home improvement inventories can be lost and things fall through the cracks between changing assessors. The newcomers, in many cases new families and possibly business owners, end up picking up the excess taxes from the longtime owners.