YCAD meets with community regarding city, lake appraisals

Young Central Appraisal District hosted an informational meeting on Friday with the goal of addressing issues regarding increases in appraisals both at Lake Graham and within the city of Graham. The meeting, in the Graham Junior High School new gym, drew a large attendance from community members and area leaders.

The meeting had YCAD Chief Appraiser Luke Robbins, YCAD Deputy Chief Appraiser Jesse Blackmon and Perdue Brandon Fielder Collins and Mott Attorney Jeanmarie Baer speak on the methodology behind the change and the legality of the situation. Robbins said it is up to the appraiser to follow the property tax code and appraise property within the district.

“What we do and the processes that we go through are pretty stringently mandated by the property tax code and in the property tax code they direct us to use the uniform standards of professional appraisal standards as is our guideline in our roadmap, so to speak, of how we go about the methodology in our appraisals and creating appraisals,” Robbins said. “The property tax code dictates that we as appraisers, appraise the property at 100% of the market value, regardless of the tax rate or any outside forces. We are a political subdivision. We are designed to take the politics somewhat out of this process, so in general we are responsible for just setting the value and we try to do that as fairly and equally as we can to everybody in Young County.”

With many lake lots this year getting raises in the appraisals from the previous year, those in attendance were wondering what was the cause for the raise. Robbins said the raise was due to placing a $35,000 an acre appraisal on the leasehold.

“So what we did was look at the sales out there and try to extrapolate essentially a land value, but not entirely a land value because you are already paying in some cases $250, in some cases $400 a year in that lease. So that had to be considered that you are already paying that. So essentially the number that we came up with and we feel like we were ultra conservative was to put $35,000 an acre on that leasehold,” Robbins said.

For the rest of the story, see the July 22 edition of The Graham Leader.