A short one from the Ohio Court of Appeals.
In City of North Canton v. Brown, No. 2024-CA00030 (Dec. 16, 2024), the court held the trial court in a just compensation action wrongly excluded the owner's evidence of the County's property tax valuation.
Hang on. Doesn't the owner usually want to exclude evidence of property tax valuation in a just compensation case? Even though an appraisal for just compensation purposes and an appraisal for property tax purposes look at "value," we know that the goals and methods of each are different, so that's an apples-to-oranges comparison no?
Not always. Here, the court didn't conclude that the tax valuation was conclusive, merely "'some' proof of value, and is thus relevant evidence." Slip op. at 7. Moreover, this "is not a case in which a city or governmental entity is arguing the tax assessment should be admissible because the taxpayer or landowner somehow 'acquiesced' or 'stipulated' to the value by paying taxes." Id.
Here, the owner asserted that just compensation included the value of the buildings on the site. The city's appraiser, however, testified that he did not place any value on the buildings. The tax valuation, where the county assigned value to the buildings, tended to show that the buildings had some value, argued the owner. The court agreed: "For years, appellant paid taxes on this assessment, and the county accepted taxed based on this assessment." Slip op. at 8.
The court rejected the city's argument that the general rule is that property tax valuation is categorically inadmissible to show just compensation. The cases relied on by the city to support that argument were either not on-point (for example, the main case cited was where property tax valuation was offered in a tort case), or "old" (during a time when property tax valuations were believed to be unreliable).
Today, however, "the modernization of the auditor’s methods and the fact that there are now uniform rules and methods of valuing and assessing real property as promulgated by the Ohio tax commissioner have made tax assessments not inherently unreliable." Slip op. at 9. Any unreliability goes to weight, not admissibility.
So what do you think? Is there (and should there be) a general rule that property tax valuations come in or stay out in just compensation cases? Do property tax valuations today bear the same stigma of unreliability as the court says they were before?
City of North Canton v. Brown, No. 2024-CA00030 (Ohio Ct. App. Dec. 16, 2024)
