ROCHESTER – The Town of Rochester's board heard from members of the Board of Assessment Review, or BOAR, at Thursday's audit meeting regarding major discrepancies in the assessments of the town's real properties.

Alan Levine, who chairs the BOAR, argued for a stepped-up re-evaluation of the town's properties. He said the town's property assessments are too disparate and claimed that there continues to be gross inconsistencies between assessments per square foot. He offered an example of the town's ranch homes, whose values range from $30 per square foot to more than $400 per square foot. Of his research, Levine contends that he found that many homes in excellent condition were valued at $100 per square foot or less, while others in poorer condition appear to be assessed at much higher levels.

In response, Supervisor Carl Chipman agreed to form an ad-hoc committee, comprising Levine, Claude Suhl, Martha Tardibuono of the BOAR, Town Assessor Cindy Stokes, Councilmember and liaison to the BOAR, Lynn Archer and Councilmember and liaison to the assessor, Tavi Cilenti, to look into the feasibility of conducting a "speedy re-eval."

Archer has been working with Stokes and the BOAR in an attempt to rectify long-standing issues with the town's property tax rolls. The remediation plan will begin with a comparison of the assessment cards in the Assessor's office to the town's tax map to try to identify potentially missing and under-assessed properties. Chipman noted that in the six months since Stokes was appointed full-time assessor, the town has put more than $17 million of property on the rolls. He said that number represents people who, until this year, were not paying property taxes.

Stokes said she's been working on the larger items, as instructed by the board. "I'm one person and I can't clean up 20 years worth of neglect in six months," she said, adding, "I didn't create the mess, I inherited it." Since her appointment as Assessor, Stokes has found a box of building permits dating from 1999 on structures that had never been put on the tax rolls. The inaccuracies and unlisted properties date to the tenure of her predecessor, former town assessor, Sharon Hornbeck.

Members of the town board acknowledged that they have more than 1,700 under-assessed or missing properties in the township, which creates an undue burden on those property owners who are properly assessed.

While Archer and Councilmember Tony Spano voted in favor of the formation of the ad-hoc committee, they added a caveat: that the committee's most important mission is to "get the data verification done within the allotted timeframe, with the understanding that the problem is bigger than just that." Archer suggested looking at the problem in a "linear fashion," wherein the first step would be data verification, followed by a re-evaluation.

Chipman said, "No matter what, we're going to move the process along toward a re-eval in 2011." The town board expects that the data verification, which will create an inventory of all the town property holdings, will be completed by the year's end.

To that end, the board also interviewed prospective appraisers who bid to conduct the data verification. The companies vying for the project include: Appraisal Consultants of North Syracuse, Michael Dunham from Kingston, Tyler Technologies of Connecticut, KLW Municipal, Inc. of Buffalo, Michael Maxwell from Syracuse, and GAR Associates, which operates out of Amherst, NY. The board will vote on its decision at the regular town board meeting on Thursday, June 4.

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