Interview with Newtown Town Assessor Chris Kelsey

Hey everyone! I’m here for our first August update. I had time to sit down with our town assessor, Chris Kelsey, the other day. We talked about a little bit about the uproar that increase of taxes and decreases in assessment has caused. I thought it would be helpful if we just got a good understanding of what the process is like.

I know I don’t like paying higher taxes, but I didn’t understand the full process. Chris was kind enough to answer a few questions for us.

Can you tell us about the process of assessing homes in Newtown?

Reevaluations are state mandated. We are required to do so every five years. There’s a couple of different ways we can do that. We are required to do inspections every 10 years and every 5th year is based on the data we already have. So, sometimes we have some big value changes with that time gap.

We also analyze sales, any sales from October 1, 2011 to October 1, 2012. We break them down so we can compare those to every other house in town. It gives us a general measuring stick. We take 10 sales and compare it to 300 houses and we do that by breaking everything down into a component price and then taking that price and applying to all the homes. It’s not perfect, but it’s the system that’s in place in the state of Connecticut.

What can you say to individuals who live in more expensive neighborhoods who may believe their home may be unfairly re-assessed?

We have definitely seen sticker shock through the years. I’ve worked in a few towns where we have definitely seen shifts, that’s why we moved from 10 year to 5 year time periods for reevaluations. Here, in town, we saw shifts in particular types of homes.

Our water front homes were not previously assessed high enough, as water front properties.  The last reevaluation there was never a premium put on the property. Through this reevaluation we put on a premium.

I also saw our higher end homes were under assessed.  I would have sales of $1.4 million, but valued at $800,000.  A lot of those evaluations were 20%-30% low in 2007. Through the 2012 reevaluation we had to put a more accurate evaluation. So it is true, they did lose value from 2007 to 2012 but our assessments don’t reflect that as much as the real world.

There is always an opportunity to appeal an assessment. You have to appeal an assessment, not a tax bill. The deadline to appeal is always February 20th. You can appeal every year. It is usually a 20-25 day window to get your appeal in. The Board of Appeals consists of three members from the community who are elected.

I’d like to thank Chris for explaining this process for us! And thank you everyone for watching!