photo by: Journal-World

The west side of the Douglas County Courthouse, 1100 Massachusetts St.

After a big jump in home values across the county, the Douglas County Appraiser’s Office now says it’s heard from more property owners wanting to appeal their valuations than at any time in the past decade.

But the numbers look more normal in comparison to what the office saw in the 1990s and early 2000s, and County Appraiser Steven Miles said that about half of the appeals processed so far have led to some change in valuation, which is consistent with historical norms.

Miles told the Journal-World in a phone interview Thursday that his office had received 1,210 meeting requests from property owners this year. That’s more than double the number of meeting requests last year — 513 — and the office has only had one year in the past decade, 2014, when it received more than a thousand requests.

But Miles said that in terms of broader historical trends, this year’s numbers don’t look as unusual. He said the office regularly handled around 1,500 of these meetings per year throughout the 1990s, and it had nearly 1,900 hearings in 2001.

“Actually, the lower numbers we’ve had recently are probably more unusual than what we used to experience all the time,” Miles said. “It’s always hard to tell.

“People become more attuned with the market and realize that our values are reasonable and don’t feel they have a sufficient argument to pursue it,” he added. “But when we have a larger increase like we had this year, we anticipated a heavier number of requests than we’ve had in the most recent past.”

Most homeowners in Douglas County have seen the taxable value of their homes increase by more than 15% based on the office’s initial valuation this year. Miles told the Journal-World last month that was the largest average increase he’d ever seen in the roughly 30 years he’s been with the appraiser’s office. The current meetings are those property owners’ first opportunity to request a change.

So far, the office has only issued decisions on 116 of the requests from this year, and Miles said about half of them have had changes to their valuation — a rate that he said was consistent with past years. But often, the changes aren’t as big as what the property owners are looking for. Miles said many changes are minor and are due to elements like the condition of a home’s interior, which the office typically doesn’t consider in its valuations.

“Keep in mind that sometimes when I say a change, yes, the value changed, but sometimes it wasn’t very much or not near what the people maybe were asking for,” Miles said. “But there was a change.”

The meetings with property owners began on March 21 and will continue through May 6. Miles said he and his appraisal staff of seven people would feel a little extra pressure in trying to address the 1,000 or so remaining requests, but he also said that his staff had been trained for these types of situations.

“At this point, I’m not nervous about getting done,” Miles said.

Property owners in Kansas are able to contest their valuations once per year. For property owners who missed the March 30 deadline to request a meeting, it’s not too late; they can still file a “Protest of Payment of Ad Valorem Taxes” on or before Dec. 20, the date at which the first half of their property tax payment is due.

Miles said the protest of payment process is spelled out in Kansas statute, and it ultimately ends up back at his office and results in an informal meeting. That option technically contests a requester’s taxes, rather than the valuation from the appraiser’s office that led to their tax payment total. The same option is available when the second half of the tax payment is due on May 10, 2023. In any case, Miles said a property owner can only use one of these options per year, not all three.

The value of a property is only part of the equation used to determine how much the owner pays in property taxes. The other part of the equation is the tax rate — known as a mill levy — which will be set by local governments when they make their 2023 budgets this summer.