It's the Law

The City of Falls Church took a huge step toward getting its house in order for the now-emerging next phase in its development by retaining a professional, outside firm to come in and do a door-to-door reappraisal of the value of every residential and commercial real estate property in the city starting at the beginning of this year.

City Manager Dan McKeever is to be commended for the overall quality of his leadership, but especially for initiating this all-important piece of the puzzle. For whatever reason, it appears the City had never before undertaken this kind of systematic and comprehensive reappraisal. Normally, jurisdictions have some way of achieving a review of this kind every half-dozen years or so.

But not so, Falls Church. When McKeever moved to post all the City's residential and commercial real estate assessed values on the City web site two years ago, a near-deafening buzz began to emanate from City neighborhoods. Property owners began talking about numerous cases of uneven and outdated assessments of individual properties. When the effort to hire a qualified new City assessor last summer stalled, McKeever pushed ahead by retaining the outside firm to undertake the sweeping, on the ground reappraisal.

The result was reported by McKeever to the City Council this Monday. On average, and taken all together, the value of the City's real restate was appraised at 25% higher than it had been a year ago. The jump is due to three factors: 1. appreciation in value due to continued red-hot market conditions for real estate in the region, 2. renovations and other improvements to existing properties, and, 3. adjustments made to bring all properties into fair and equitable relationship in cases where that was required. McKeever reported that over 58% of properties will be assessed under the 25% average increase, but that when the new assessments are mailed out next month, many property owners in Falls Church may have to sit down and take a deep breath.

Nonetheless, there are three good sides to this. 1. the City is now in full compliance with the law, which requires fair and equitable appraisal and tax assessments on all properties, 2. Falls Church property owners will experience a significant increase in the collateral value of their assets, and, 3. Falls Church citizens have been braced, anyway, for a comparable tax increase hit, knowing that their overwhelming support for passage of the school bond referendum last November would add 13% to their tax bill above continued double-digit annual property value growth. Taking this increase entirely through an increase in the appraised value of property, rather than through a tax rate increase, is a far better outcome for these property owners. In that context, the tax rate will not rise, and may even drop.