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Confusion over bills taxes residents' patience Records glitch, new law lead to late notices By PETER WONG Fred Steele of Medford received unwelcome but not entirely unexpected news in his mail this month. He and his wife, Marilynn, received a bill for $2,853 in property taxes from Jackson County, payable Nov. 15. The bill stems from the county's discovery of an error that omitted his house, but not his lot, from county tax rolls for the past three years. "I consider myself lucky," he said with a little laugh. "It came the day after my birthday." Steele's experience illustrates how a 2-year-old city of Medford paperwork problem is combining with a new Oregon law to bring a few taxpayers unpleasant surprises at the mailbox several years after the mistakes. Steele, a retired circuit court employee, said he knew he was paying too little in property taxes on the house he bought in a clustered development on Modoc Avenue in 1997. Last year, he paid $350 on the property valued at $24,030 on the tax rolls, but according to the corrected rolls, he should have been paying about $1,000 more in taxes for the house and lot valued at a total of $92,220. "We live only four blocks from where we were before, so I knew that this was going to come up eventually," he said. "The first year I saw this figure on my bill, I said it seemed a little low. The person at the assessor's office said it was, but the county didn't have my property on the rolls yet. I said, `What's the deal?' He said, `They probably will bill you right away,' but `right away' never came." That was about two years ago, when almost 600 properties in Medford, Steele's among them, were omitted from the rolls mostly because permit information from the Medford Building Department was not transferred to the Jackson County Assessment Department. The problem stemmed from staff changes in the Medford Building Department -- its longtime director and a building technician resigned under fire in 1996 -- and a switchover about the same time to a computerized permit process that left county appraisers dealing with paper for months. Seventeen additions were made to 1999 rolls because of omissions, said Jackson County Assessor Dan Ross. Others in Steele's situation may still be discovered. "It was a substantial problem," Ross said. "An appraiser would go out and tell us we were missing houses from the rolls. The only reason we were picking up some of them for the rolls was because we had drawings already done. "We have picked up most of the big stuff, but we still are reviewing some of the old permits." Medford Building Director Chris Reising said the departments now have a direct computer link, making a recurrence unlikely. "They have access to any information we have," Reising said. The omitted properties added up to about $12.2 million in taxable value on the rolls. Ross said it translated to a loss of about $60,000 in taxes annually for Medford, the county, schools and other local governments. Some property values, like Steele's, were partly on the rolls. Complicating the experiences of Steele and others is an Oregon law that gives county assessors five years to correct tax rolls for property omissions or errors. The 1999 Legislature, in response to the case of an elderly landowner from Portland, changed state law to require additional tax payments stemming from corrections to apply in the following tax year instead of immediately. The first payment date for 2000-01 taxes is Nov. 15. Ross said the five-year period for corrections to property values on county tax rolls coincided with the six-year cycle under which assessors were required to conduct field appraisals of every property. But under 1996 and 1997 measures that voters approved to revamp Oregon's property tax system, most taxable property values now increase just 3 percent annually -- and so do most property taxes received by local governments. New construction adds to those taxable values. "Under the old system, property values were less of an issue because cities and other local governments got fixed amounts of taxes that voters approved, regardless of values," Ross said. "Under the new system, values are their lifelines -- and they are more attentive to them." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA