The effects of a millage increase, recent property reappraisals and the adoption of new state appraisal guidelines will blend to form higher tax bills for most property owners in Pike County.
That’s the ultimate takeaway from Pike County Tax Assessor Laurie Allen’s speech to the McComb Exchange Club last week.
Allen, who began a four-year term in January, generally spoke about the functions of her office and thanked voters for putting her in it. Toward the end of her speech she noted that Pike County had recently adopted the new state property appraisal manual, which plugs in numbers that tax assessors use to appraise property values.
Allen said new residential construction and commercial buildings will likely see the biggest changes in their tax bills under the new state guidelines, which have been in place for five years but only adopted by Pike County this year. Allen said Pike and Pearl River counties were the last in Mississippi to adopt the guidelines, which are mandatory.
Also affecting tax bills, county supervisors are raising taxes by half a mill in order to meet contractual obligations to buy more land at the Gateway Industrial Park.
And the county recently completed its quadrennial appraisal of property.
Of all of the issues affecting property taxes, that last one is the most closely related to Allen’s office.
“First of all, we discover all taxable property in the county,” Allen said, laying out the appraisal process. “Our guys are riding around every day of the year discovering what you have taken down and what you have added.”
If property owners have made significant improvements, their property values — and by extention their tax bills — could go up. But if they’ve done some demolition, their taxes could go down.
Allen noted that 25 percent of the county is reappraised every year.
County taxes are based on two things — assessed property values and millage rates. As property values rise, so too will tax bills, even if millage stays the same.
But, in Pike County’s case, both property taxes and assessed value are up.
Many responsibilities to office
Turning to other aspects of her job, Allen said there are a lot of components to the appraiser’s office.
“We also keep all of the records pertaining to the real and personal property as accurate as possible,” she said, adding that the office also does all of the mapping for all county departments.
Allen said she started with a mostly fresh staff in January, as some employees retired and another moved away for another job,
“At the beginning of the year I had a few employees added to the staff due to the ones that left,” she said, adding that her first day on the job was also the first day of work for three of her employees, not to mention the first day for homeowners to file for homestead exemption.
Allen said the three-month period to file for homestead exemption brings a lot of people into her office.
“It’s so good to meet the people and interact with them and learn a lot about them,” she said, adding that she took 930 homestead applications. “It’s always a very interesting season but a very busy season.”
Tax cheats beware
Allen said her office also catches people who are trying to defraud the county.
She said one woman was caught filing an improper homestead exemption at a house that was under construction at the site of another house that had been torn down.
“There’s just no possible way she could be living in that house,” Allen said.
Homestead exemptions can only be applied to primary residences.
“I didn’t have to do much research to discover that she had been doing this for years,” Allen said, adding that the homestead application had been filed in the woman’s disabled son’s name, and he was a student in Walthall County.
“So she was getting the full disability homestead,” Allen said.
The irony of the case, Allen said, is that the woman had claimed the house wa not being lived in so she could have a delinquent county solid waste bill written off.
Allen said her office discovered seven years’ worth of fraudulent homestead exemptions but were only able to collect back taxes on five in that case.
“It cost the county a lot of money to prosecute and there was a lot of red tape involved,” she said of officials’ decision to collect just five years’ worth of taxes.
Still, Allen said anything recovered is a benefit to the county and all of the other taxpayers who support it.
“It makes your portion higher, my portion higher, your elderly parents’ portion higher,” she said of tax cheaters.
