January 24, 2000
Real estate tax bills hitting the mail
By Erik Burriss
Staff Writer
Death and (despite delays caused by new laws and new software) taxes are indeed the two constants in life. The Seneca County Treasurer's office began the process of mailing out more than 33,000 real estate tax bills to the county's property owners last week
The bill itself is divided into two parts. The left side is a mishmash of letters and numbers that identify the property being taxed and give some of the figures used to calculate the amount of tax on the property.
The first thing you see is the eight-digit stub number. This number is actually pretty useless since it changes every year. If there are questions about your tax bill, Seneca County Treasurer Marguerite Bernard recommends using the parcel I.D. number immediately below the stub number to identify your property. This 15 character alpha-numeric string tells which tax district the property is in, what city ward (if any) it's in, as well as if the property was once part of a larger lot.
Also included is the mailing address for the property, which half-year the bill is for and the effective rate, in mills, that is used to figure the year's taxes.
The remainder of that side of the tax bill is a short version of how the final amount of taxes was computed. Starting at the top is the assessed value of the property, which serves as the base figure for the calculation. The assessed value is 35 percent of the market value of the property. That figure is multiplied by the effective rate, which changes from year to year and varies throughout the county based on the tax district in which the property is located.
The effective rate starts off with the 6.8 mills that are assessed county-wide. Added to that are each tax district's 10 mills of "inside millage." Inside millages were set up in the 1930s and are specific to each of the county's 56 tax districts, Seneca County Auditor Larry Beidelschies said. Also included in the effective rate are the millages of levies approved by the voters of a tax district, or "outside millages." For example, the 3.85-mill levy that affects only the New Riegel school district is an outside millage.
A mill represents one-thousandth of a dollar, so for each mill of a levy, a property owner pays $1 in taxes for every $1,000 of the property's assessed value.
The effective rate varies from year to year, because outside millages can only take in the amount of money that was approved by the voters when the levy was passed, Beidelschies said. If the property values in a tax district change, the millages are adjusted to keep the amount of money collected consistent with what was approved by the voters.
This adjusted tax will be reduced by either one, two or three additional tax credits. All property owners get a 10 percent "rollback" mandated by the state, Bernard said. Owners who live on their property get a 2.5 percent "homestead" tax credit, while people over 65 who live on their property who have an annual income of less than $23,300 receive an additional 2.5 percent "homestead rollback," Beidelschies said. Both homestead credits apply only to the property on which the owner lives; properties rented to others do not get the credits.
The net real estate taxes are payable in two installments. The first is due Feb. 18, Bernard said. Payments that are one to 10 days late will have an additional 5 percent tacked on as a penalty and payments that are more than 10 days late are assessed a 10 percent penalty.
The right side of the tax bill is the detachable portion that gets mailed back to the treasurer's office along with the payment. It contains the same information in a more condensed form.