By Susan Randall | Casa Grande Dispatch
It looks like Pinal County’s total assessed value may have grown for the first time in five years.
Deputy County Assessor John Ellinwood said official figures for 2014 are not ready for publication yet, but early estimates look as if the county’s assessed value grew by roughly 1.75 percent since the previous year.
For years, the county’s assessed value — the value of property to which tax rates are applied — slowly increased to reach $1 billion in fiscal year 2003, $1.2 billion in 2004 and $1.3 billion in 2005. It jumped slightly to $1.6 billion in 2006, then leaped to $2.3 billion in 2007 and $3.4 billion in 2008 as more houses were built.
When the bottom fell out of the housing market, the county’s assessed value fell to $2.8 billion in 2009, $2.5 billion in 2010, $2.2 billion in 2011 and 2012 and $2 billion in 2013.
The five-year drop in assessed value was directly tied to the decline in home property values, Ellinwood said.
“This is a mostly residential county. We have some industrial, commercial, retail property, but there are just so many rooftops — that’s the over- whelming portion of our real estate.”
When a taxing authority’s assessed value increases, it allows the authority to lower its tax rate, if it chooses to. If the levy, the total annual revenue generated from property taxes, stays the same, tax bills will be close to what they were the year before. If expenses increase while values rise, the taxing authority may choose to leave the property tax rate the same, and tax bills will go up.
