SARANAC LAKE — The town of Harrietstown is preparing to reassess the value of all of its properties.

On Thursday, the first of four public information sessions brought a standing-room-only crowd to the town hall as town Assessor Marten Tichenor explained how a reassessment works and fielded concerns from residents.

Right now, some homes in Harrietstown are assessed lower than they should be, some homes are assessed higher than they should be and some are approximately where they should be.

Tichenor said the town doesn’t do a reassessment to raise or lower taxes; they do it to rearrange how the tax burden is spread out and try to get closer to an equitable spread across the community.

“This is not a tool to do anything to the tax levies. It doesn’t touch the tax levies,” he said.

Public information sessions have been scheduled for Jan. 14 at 8 a.m., Jan. 21 at noon — both at the Harrietstown Town Hall basement boardroom — and Jan. 27 at 4 p.m. at the Adirondack Regional Airport conference room.

Tichenor said a reassessment is a scary thing. Everyone’s worried if their taxes are going up. Tichenor said people are getting “nickled and dimed to death” in every corner of their lives.

He cannot say if reassessing someone’s home will raise their taxes or not, but said it is usually roughly split into thirds, he said — around one third of homeowners’ taxes go up as a result of the reassessment, around one third goes down and around one third stays the same.

Tichenor said the Tri-Lakes is seeing the highest cost of development it has ever had. This widens the spread between low-value properties and high-value properties. There’s a premium on the sale of recently renovated properties.

Broadly, he said, if a property’s assessment increases, then its taxes go up. New renovations and new buildings typically see their taxes rise the most, he said.

Tichenor said the lowest socioeconomic demographic suffers the most when there’s inequity in assessments as there is now. When the spread widens, the tax burden slides to one side — usually the side with lower incomes. He also said inequities breed lawsuits. These lawsuits can be expensive and long, increasing costs for taxpayers. The reassessment allows the town to avoid them, Tichenor said.

Town Supervisor Jordanna Mallach said if assessments double, that doesn’t mean the town would charge the same tax rate per $1,000 of assessed value. It would essentially cut the tax rate in half.

“The amount that the town charges for taxes doesn’t go up because the assessments go up,” Mallach said. “An assessment does not allow us to overall collect more money.

“I think that’s a misconception that’s sometimes out there, is that if property values go up the town gets more money,” she added. “Nobody gets to collect more taxes.”

Tichenor said everyone’s taxes will likely go up — not because of their assessment, but because the budgetary needs of the town, village and school rise every year and they levy more in taxes every year.

What people actually pay in taxes is more about the budgets of the town, village and school district.

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Why reassess?

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Tichenor said reassessments are done after major disruptions in the real estate market. At the tail end of the 2008 recession and subprime mortgage crisis, Harrietstown did its last reassessment in 2010. At the time, sale prices of homes were lower than their assessed values.

Then, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic massively increased home sale prices.

“The price of real estate has doubled in value,” Tichenor said. “And it continues on its way up.”

Because people are paying way more for a home than they would have several years ago, the assessment of the home’s value is off.

Not all real estate markets appreciate at the same rate. The town has several categories for real estate — including residential, waterfront residential, rural vacant and commercial.

When one market takes off, surging past the others, it creates inequity. This inequality is a problem for the people whose property did not appreciate in that time.

“What appreciates the least is often the homes of people with lower incomes,” Tichenor said. “The tax burden slides onto those lower-income or lower-value properties.”

This is not a set rule here, though. Tichenor said there are plenty of people living in high-value homes whose families have been there for years who are not necessarily high-income families.

“We have low-income people who own high-value property,” Tichenor said. “That’s something unique to this area.”

Tichenor said the town looked at hiring a third-party company to do the reassessment, but these are very expensive and often not as accurate, since the companies don’t know the local market. Mallach said the price would have been between $400,000 and $500,000.

So, the town did it in-house.

Doing a reassessment is a lot of work, but Tichenor said he prefers it. If there’s a mistake in an assessment — and he’s confident there will be plenty of them — he can take the blame and can fix it easier than an outside contractor.

He said home appraisal is an incredibly imperfect system. If someone thinks the impact notice or change of assessment notice is way out of whack with their true assessment, he said they should talk to him, because it probably is.

“Appraising property is not a science,” Tichenor said. “It doesn’t work.”

It’s attempting to give a mathematical answer to a very human question. It relies a lot on opinion. And, assessors do not have access to the interiors of homes.

The way he calculates a home’s assessed value is by collecting records of its size in square footage, gauging the quality of the home through its appearance and age and then using that data to find the recent sale prices of similar size and quality homes in the town to get the center value. Commercial property is also valued with how much income it brings in.

Dianna Dudley pointed out that this is all based on if the homeowner decides to sell, which she feels is a false way to look at it. She’s not planning to sell. She understands why this is the case, but said she doesn’t like it because it will likely increase her assessment and increase her taxes.

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Contesting assessments

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People can gauge what a reassessment could do to their taxes by comparing their property to similar properties that have sold recently. If theirs has appreciated above 50%, their taxes will probably go up, he said. If a property is in rough shape, its taxes will probably go down.

Tichenor said to not use Zillow, since it often has inaccurate numbers. He suggested checking local real estate sales records instead.

He said he needs property owners to participate to make the process better. If someone wants to grieve their assessment, he welcomes it. He said, as an assessor, he’s used to being wrong. Assessments almost always are wrong, since he doesn’t know factors like the interior or income of a property.

If he can’t prove why a property is assessed a certain way, he said that it shouldn’t be assessed that way.

Tichenor said people can bring him square footage or a private appraisal to grieve an assessment.

He said there’s been a theme in assessment for years that if people aren’t paying attention, that’s good because they won’t bug the assessor. He said he welcomes people bugging him. They pay a lot in taxes and deserve to be able to talk to him about it. He said being an assessor is a customer service job.

The town is currently evaluating values of homes.

In March, notices with tentative assessments will go out to all property owners.

Then, through April, people can meet with Tichenor to discuss their assessments.

On May 1, the tentative tax roll is filed with the state, shortly followed by a notice of assessment change being sent to property owners.

May 26 is grievance day, when homeowners can formally challenge their assessments.

The final tax roll is filed with the state on July 1.

These new assessments will be reflected on a school tax bill first in September, in a town tax bill in December and on a village tax bill in June 2027.

Then, Tichenor said he’ll start the process over again, because values continue to rise. He doesn’t want to get caught like the town did last time and have to start lowering assessments because the market crashes. He sees a lot of precursors to a market crash. Every month, when he sees new home sales, they’re selling as high or higher than the previous month. And properties are adding hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity in a few short years without real renovation causing it.

Residents pointed out that the five southern towns in Franklin County — Harrietstown, Tupper Lake, Franklin, Brighton and Santa Clara — fund 61% of the county budget, with the other 14 covering the rest. This is because property is high-valued here among the mountains and lakes.

How much a house is worth is all about location, location, location. A house in Saranac Lake identical to a house in Malone will be valued much higher, because it is in an area where people are willing to pay more to own property.

When multiple towns sit in a village or school district, the state assigns “equalization rates” to those towns to ensure they are paying equal amounts of the taxes to those villages or schools.

If a town has not reassessed recently — as Harrietstown has — this raises the tax rate per $1,000 of assessed value. Because, compared to a town which has current assessments, Harrietstown’s homes are undervalued, there are fewer $1,000s of assessed value to tax. Currently, the town has an equalization rate of 70%. This reassessment should bring it up to 100%.