Westport’s assessor said today that the increasing number of teardowns is making it more difficult to accurately value Westport’s housing stock in the current property revaluation.
Westport Assessor Gaffney at Rotary today: “I am not afraid of being sued.” (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Dave Matlow for WestportNow.com
“There are so many teardowns now, the town is starting to change,” William Gaffney told the weekly meeting of the Westport Rotary Club at the Inn at Longshore.
“This change makes it more difficult to do my job when the rest of the neighborhood has not caught up.”
Gaffney said his priority now is establishing a database of all recent home sales in Westport. This information will be used to develop a revaluation “model” that will place value on land, buildings, and “all the amenities that go on a property.”
He said appraisers from Massachusetts-based Vision Appraisal Technology have been canvassing homes in the northwest section of Westport for several weeks and will assist in developing the model.
The official, who was hired away from Milford following a decision to scrap Westport’s 2003 property assessment, said his target is to value homes at 5 or 6 percent below their market value as of the Oct. 1 revaluation date.
“As long as I do it for everyone, it’s fair,” he said, acknowledging the difficulty of keeping up with rapidly changing home values.
Gaffney urged Westporters to allow appraisers in their homes or otherwise risk possibly having the home overvalued on the basis of similar homes in the neighborhood.
“We’re not the Gestapo. We’re not going to break down the door,” he said.
He said “field cards” from each home visit will be posted on the Internet and strongly recommended that residents check their accuracy.
Gaffney also urged owners of commercial properties to be sure to return a questionnaire he soon will be sending out asking for income and expense information.
He said this is the primary way commercial properties will be valued and failure to return the questionnaire will bring a 10 percent penalty on the assessment.
Gaffney also put Westporters on notice that he is not shy about going to court if a homeowner who disagrees with a valuation decides to sue.
“I’ve been involved in 140 trials, maybe the highest number of any assessor in Connecticut,” he said, “and have been successful in 80 to 90 percent of the cases.”
He said his only concern was that in Westport, unlike in Milford, there is no town attorney in house and that having outside counsel had the potential of driving up litigation costs.
In response to a question, Gaffney said waterfront property in Westport is likely to appreciate more rapidly just as it has in other Connecticut shoreline communities.
He said some of the burden is likely to be shifted off of commercial properties which tend not to appreciate as fast.
As he has said before, Gaffney vowed to be fully responsible for the current revaluation going well. “If this reval goes south, I take all the heat,” he said, making clear that would not happen.
The official said he was a big proponent of the idea that the town assessor should not live where he works.
“First of all, I couldn’t afford it,” Gaffney said. “But if I could, I wouldn’t. Once I leave work, I get out of town.” He did acknowledge, however, that he sometimes might stop at Mario’s, a Saugatuck restaurant, for a cocktail.
“But no one knows me yet,” he said, “and when they do, I won’t go.”
