Town of Niles, Cayuga County (WSYR-TV) - Without explanation and little or no improvements to their homes, many property owners in the Cayuga County Town of Niles saw the value of their properties skyrocket.
With Skaneateles Lake on one side and Owasco Lake on the other, the Town of Niles is uniquely located. Landowners' disappointment with their latest reassessments, however, is a quality shared with other CNY towns.
Among those unhappy property owners is Bill Carroll, who owns nine parcels in the Town. "Shocked, I mean absolutely shocked at some of these where these values were," he said.
For the first time since 2005 the Town of Niles decided it was time to recalculate property values to ensure everyone was paying their fair share.
"Nobody here is trying to get out of paying taxes, we just want a fair market value to what's happening and with a 200% to 300% over inflation no one can justify even close to those values they've come up with," said Bill Carroll.
The assessment on Carroll's house, for example, didn't go up at all but an old sawmill just down the road, which hasn't worked in over 20 years and only has a new roof, saw its value skyrocket over 1300%.
"No water on it, there's no septic, there's no electricity, it's a shed and to go up to that its hard for me to calculate," said Dale Weed, who owns New Hope Mills.
"These figures were arbitrarily inflated, there's no justification for what has been placed for values on these properties," said Tamara Severson, who owns a marina and a farm in the town.
Town Supervisor Rick Slagle disagrees, saying the process is anything but arbitrary. The assessor uses two methods to calculate the figures. "One being a cost method, what it would cost and when it was built and depreciated it from there and the other being comparables to what things sold for in the area," he said.
Slagle says the Town is using a lot of the data from recent assessments in Sempronius and Moravia to help calculates values in Niles. "It's an opinion value and your opinion and my opinion may not be the same," he said.
Slagle says people have more than one chance to present their case to the assessor for consideration.
The Town Supervisor says a worker from the State Office of Real Property Services has been looking over the assessments to make sure they are in line.
The town is holding informal reviews for the next several weeks where assessments could be changed, and there is also the formal grievance day coming up in May where the values can be challenged.
