ROCKLAND — “We really are out of whack in a number of places,” said Kerry Leichtman, who is newly employed as Rockland’s assessor. “It would be great to fix that up.”

Rockland City Councilors are wading through the complexities of house revaluations in order to present to residents a plan for the City. Through a show of hands during an 87-minute conversation Dec. 19, all five councilors indicated a desire to continue discussions through the upcoming months, and to generate information that can be relayed to the public in a clear and understandable manner.

The immediate question is whether Rockland wants to join a Request for Proposals (RFP) with Camden and Rockport in order to learn what the true cost of a reval will be.

Camden’s reval is going to “be as of April 1, 2024,” and Rockport’s reval is going to “be as of April 1, 2025,” according to Leichtman.

Rockland would still create its own contract with the awarded bidder and pay its own money for the reval. The reval companies now charge by the parcel, so there’s no group benefit; however, the benefit to using the same company is they’ll have an idea for what Midcoast Maine is about, according to Leichtman.

“And that does make a big difference,” he said. “We’ll have a core group of people that understands this area.”

A full reval, which is what Rockland is aiming for, will take an estimated two years to complete. The last full one was done in 2004. In 2019, KRT began a market adjustment reval, which wasn’t a true reval, according to City Manager Tom Luttrell.

“Basically it’s a drive-by,” he said. “It’s something that they pull the building permits for, and they go out and drive by the houses, and then put a valuation on, to make sure everything’s been captured, from the outside, anyway.”

The upcoming project is to be a complete revaluation, where the firm enters each home.

Many residents, including Bill Lewis, considers KRT’s 2019 – April 1, 2020 revaluation less than adequate due to major disparities in the values of individual houses and neighborhoods. Leichtman disagreed, saying KRT’s job was “first rate” based on the resources that they were provided.

“It was at the beginning of the pandemic,” he said. “Obviously, nobody knew a pandemic was coming. And when it first started, nobody knew what the effect of the pandemic would be. So, the timing for KRT’s work was unfortunate because they finished it just as real estate market prices began to take off. So, it almost invalidated itself right away.”

Revaluations, also known as equalization, measure assessment quality by a ratio. Assessors use current sales numbers. The assessed value is divided by the sale price, creating the ratio. The valuation then takes the sales and extrapolates those to everybody else.

Assessors categorize by house style, neighborhoods, and all other attributes to create their categories of study. A very rough example: ranch homes would be a category. The median ratio is generated.

“We always want to be somewhere between 90 and 100 percent,” he said.

Leichtman calculated the numbers for the entirety of 2020, so the numbers won’t be exactly the same as KRT, which stopped in April. Rockland had a median of 92%. That was based on qualified sales of single family homes. A year later, based on 114 sales, the median was 74%. In 2022, based on 95 sales, the median was 62%.

Bill Lewis, who was in Leichtman’s office on day one of Leichtman’s job with Rockland, showing the disparities of the valuation, said he wants the public to understand that just because the market value of a house goes up, it’s not always bad. For instance, he said, the City is losing funds if it’s not assessed properly. So, if the City doesn’t get the funds, it’s coming back at the taxpayer through the budget process. 

Leichtman provided a hypothetical situation: “Let’s say it’s 80%. The homeowners will only get 80% of their homestead exemption. They’ll only get 80% of their veteran’s exemption. Residents would only be able to claim 80% of personal property. That’s where we, as a City, will take a big hit because that’s worth a lot of revenue. The less revenue we take in, the higher the mill rate needs to be to make up for that.”

Councilor Sarah Austin said: “Nobody loves writing the check for their taxes, but we also appreciate the services that we get for it. And I think most people are willing to play that game as long as they feel like it’s a fair game. And right now it’s not.”

Reach Sarah Thompson at news@penbaypilot.com