Irondequoit recently hired an independent company to reassess property values and they sent us a notice of our new tax rate. They determined the town was currently assessed at 88% value which means taxes needed to be raised by 12% on average to generate enough tax money to dump all that salt on our roads and pay people to walk in circles around the gravestones in Irondequoit Cemetery with weed whackers.
Our taxes went up more than 12% and they estimated our house was worth more than we paid for it a few years ago. The town posted the reassessment online and Peggi spent an afternoon comparing our house to similar homes in the area. She had Google maps open on the laptop and and the tax records on a different screen while generally snooping on the neighbors. I was making humas in the kitchen and listening to her updates. I never would have guessed which house was assessed the highest on our street and our neighbors on both sides with similar houses were assessed much lower than us.
It seems Un-American not to contest so we attended an informational meeting at the Town Hall called “Understanding Your Property Reassessment”. I was prepared for a snoozfest so I brought the morning paper with me. There was a headline on the front page that read “Local House Sales Tumble”. The story explained that although the sales have tumbled, the prices have remained steady. We have no housing market collapse here because we had no boom.
Growth is not all it’s cracked up to be. Steve Hoy was talking about this concept yesterday. Sustainability may be a better business model. Irondequoit starts north of the city of Rochester and it is hemmed in by Lake Ontario to the north, Irondequoit Bay to the east and the Genesee River to the west. We aren’t growing and we like it that way. We should probably just pay our taxes and shut up.
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