Don't Shoot the Tax Assessor

Palm Beach County property tax appraiser Gary Nikolits has been under fire for months for his insistence on ensuring that properties in the county are assessed at their actual value. This is in response to pressure from local elected officials to artificially lowball the assessed values assigned to homes and businesses.

He's right, of course: when assessors lowball properties' value, it makes the tax unambiguously less fair, no matter whether the preferential assessments are being given as special favors or as a general practice. This isn't to belittle the (very real) concerns of homeowners and businesses that rapidly growing assessed values will force them to sell. But anyone (including opportunistic anti-tax legislators) putting the blame on assessors is simply wrong. A new editorial in the Palm Beach Post hits this one dead on:

Commissioners have no business telling him how to do his job. They hope that criticism of Mr. Nikolits will make taxpayers forget that the commission controls taxes, because it controls the tax rate.

Not everything is pure politics, of course: it's possible that the aggressive stance elected officials are taking against Nikolits' assessments has nothing to do with scoring political points and everything to do with helping their constituents to avoid excessive property taxes. But even if their intentions are pure, the county commissioners have chosen a lousy way to achieve tax relief. Here's the Post editorial board again:

Commissioners are wrong, however, when they encourage an appraiser to ease up on a select group of property owners. As Mr. Nikolits correctly points out, such an approach could create enormous inequities in assessments and decimate the overall tax base. Manipulating appraisals for political ends can lead to other problems. Then-Gov. Bob Graham removed David Reid as Palm Beach County property appraiser in 1981. A year later, Reid was convicted of lowering assessments in return for bribes.

Manipulating property values, even in the name of providing property tax "relief," can only undermine the public's faith in the tax system in the long run. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone claiming that the property tax is Florida's fairest revenue sources these days. But you can't take even baby steps toward a fair and equitable property tax until you value property at its true worth. Kudos to Gary Nikolits for standing up to the demagogues on this point.