Politician urges payment of property taxes under protest

ST. LOUIS -- After a flood of phone calls from homeowners wondering if their tax bills are based on allegedly illegal property assessments, the County Council Chairman tells residents they should pay their property taxes.

But homeowners with concerns should pay under protest, he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in Saturday's edition.

Council Chairman Kurt Odenwald said if homeowners pay, but attach a letter explaining they think an incomplete or erroneous assessment occurred, the system provides 90 days after Dec. 31 to straighten things out.

He also said he'll plan hearings in November to investigate the assessments.

Republicans Odenwald of Shrewsbury and Greg Quinn of Ballwin voiced doubts last week about 46,000 inspections that resulted in 17 to 95 percent increases in property values.

The politicians said they wondered if the necessary checks were really conducted by the assessor's office during a six-week period.

Missouri law requires an inspection of any homes whose assessments increase more than 17 percent from one year to the next. The law is unclear about whether an outside inspection can be done or if an interior inspection is needed.

County Assessor Maurice Gogarty said he welcomes an opportunity to publicly explain the process.

Spike in inspections

A study of assessor inspection records, conducted by Odenwald and Quinn, shows a large spike in the numbers of inspections said to have been made during a six-week period from early April to mid-May.

For April 26, the office reported 3,658 inspections. That would have meant 76 inspections per person if all 48 inspectors had been working that day.

Figures like that led Odenwald and Quinn to suspect that many inspections were never done and that the assessments may be illegal.

One inspector reported visiting 1,695 homes in a day. Gogarty said that the inspector chose that day to turn in his reports for a two-week period.

Gogarty said it's the tax bills, and not the assessments, that homeowners are upset about. He said he has no control over taxing districts which set the tax rates.

"We're very confident that we've done everything we could do within the resources that we have," Gogarty said. "We're hearing time and time again from property owners who are saying that their property is assessed fairly and they would not even sell their property for what we have them assessed for. It's the taxes that they are upset about."