In my first full blog entry I would like to congratulate the Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels and the legislators in both the house and senate for their work on Indiana's property tax system.  Property taxes have long been an issue in Indiana.  While we are ranked somewhere in the middle of the 50 states with respect to property tax burden per homeowner, Indiana's tax system has some major issues that have to be dealt with.  In March of 2008, many of them were addressed.

One of the issues dealt with is Indiana's assessment system.  In Indiana, our counties are divided up into townships.  We have one assessor for every county and one assessor for every township.   That was a total of approximately 1180 assessors in Indiana.  Most people don't know this, but that is more assessors than California, Texas, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  COMBINED!  This has led to large inconsistencies in the assessed values of similar properties across the state.

As part of the Governor's plan, which was widely backed by Indiana REALTORS, all the township assessors would be eliminated and the assessing duties would move up to the county level.  This was not a move to save money through the elimination of jobs, but an effort to create more consistency in assessments statewide.  The REALTORS realize that the county assessors will still need help.  This means that the township assessors may or may not loose their jobs, they may just be titled differently.

Well the legislators did not eliminate all the township assessors.  In Indiana townships that have more than 15,000 parcels of land, the township assessors will remain in place unless their position is eliminated by a public referendum.  We will need to wait and see how this plays out.  In effect, we saw the number of assessors go from 1,180 down to about 135 give or take.  That is a huge improvement and a great step towards improving our assessment system and our property tax system overall.

We also wanted to see the County assessor positions become appointed by the county rather than elected.  This would allow experience and ability to become prerequisites of the job as opposed to gaining the position through a popularity contest.  This did not happen, but because the county assessor will now be responsible for hiring and performance of their staffs, we have made some great progress in gaining the consistency we were after.  Again my hats off to the Governor and our state legislators.

This is just one piece of a comprehensive legislative package to reform our property tax system.  Look for future entries to my blog where I will talk about other pieces of this groundbreaking legislative package.