Time is up in Bannock County

Time is up for the Bannock County Board of Equalizations to finish the appeals process on property tax assessments.

The County Commissioners and the embattled Bannock County Assessor Sheri Davies were only able to make it through 610 of the 3,090 property tax appeals that they promised to get through.

If you filed an appeal and did not receive a hearing the county commissioners issued a blanket reduction of 10% to all the unheard appeals.

With the deadline of today looming and so many appeals still not heard the BOE started conducting bulk neighborhood evaluations of property assessments to try to speed the process up.

The BOE made adjustments to thousands of parcels in larger geographic areas that the Assessor’s office has classified as market neighborhood areas.

These areas contain several properties that the appraisers in the assessor’s office have put a value on based on the market trend.

This means that some people’s property assessments could be reduced even if they did not file an appeal.

Most of the assessments that were changed were from the areas in the county that are not part of cities.

Some of those include the Northern Bannock county area, Johnny Creek, Mc Cammon, Downey, Arimo, Lava Hot Springs Inkom, Buckskin area, and several other rural areas. The county is currently working on a full map of the area with the assessment changes to put on their web site.

Bannock County Commissioner Terrel Tovey says those reductions were made based on market trends “There were several market areas that the trend supported and it shows that.”many of those property assessments were reduced. Tovey continued “You cannot have a property stay stagnant and not at least be reflective of the rates of inflation. You cannot have a property that is assessed for 10 years stay the exact same. That doesn’t happen.”

The BOE heard 610 appeals, most received a reduction of some kind, 110 were reassessed back to th 2018 values, and 202 were upheld.

Bannock County Commissioners have been holding the hearings for the last three weeks many days as long as 12 hours to try to get through all the appeals. They estimate they only had about 15 appeals last year.

Meanwhile, the petition to recall Sheri Davies the Bannock County Assessor is gaining steam. They have already collected over a thousand signatures in less than a week. It would take 10 thousand signatures to put that recall on the ballot on the November elections.