Milwaukee property owners sue over taxes

Listen to this article

By James Briggs and Jack Zemlicka

The owners of two properties near the Milwaukee River are suing Milwaukee for excessive tax assessments.

B&E 53207 Corp. at 138 E. Becher St. and RDAR Corp. at 2018R S. First St. filed claims Friday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court alleging the city assessor’s office inflated property assessments and overcharged taxes in 2009.

But Milwaukee’s chief assessor, Peter Weissenfluh, said it simply was a case of bringing previously undervalued property in line with market rates.

“If we have current market evidence that we were either overvalued or undervalued,” Weissenfluh said, “we’ll make the changes and get to where we think the market should be.

“We see a lot of properties that have large increases or spikes. We also see some that have reductions.”

The city more than tripled the assessment of the 2.2-acre Becher Street property from $151,000 in 2008 to $480,100 in 2009 and 2010.

That resulted in a tax assessment of $15,106.14, whereas the plaintiff argues an accurate assessment of the property would warrant “no more than $4,000” in property taxes.

According to court documents, the city assessed the 0.97-acre property at South First Street at $246,000 in 2009 and 2010, compared with $28,000 in 2008.

The latest property tax bill was $12,052.44, but the plaintiffs argue taxes should be no higher than $1,000.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Richard Frederick, said he had no explanation for how the city could justify such dramatic increases in assessed values for two mostly vacant parcels.

“That is something you have to ask the city,” Frederick said.

But recent sales along the Milwaukee River, Weissenfluh said, gave the city new evidence that both parcels had been assessed at well below market value for several years.

“We’re catching up for a lack of data or lack of information we had,” Weissenfluh said. “We apparently were on the conservative side.”

Weissenfluh said he couldn’t name the recent sales or the dollar amounts attached to them.

“I supervise the appraisers, but I’m not familiar with every incident or every sale,” he said.

That data, Weissenfluh said, would have been available to the city’s Board of Assessors and city clerk’s office, both of which upheld the city’s assessments in separate appeals.

Weissenfluh acknowledged large tax increases could shock property owners, but he said the city had no choice but to enforce updated assessments. The city cannot offer gradual property tax increases, he said.

“Unfortunately, the law is once we know the market value of the property, they all have to be assessed off that basis,” Weissenfluh said. “We make our best attempts (to avoid great fluctuations), but sometimes we don’t have all the information to do that, and in those cases, we’re too low.

“On the flip side of that, if we’re way too high, we don’t ratchet it down, either.”