Sam Gurwitt Photo
Johannes Boeckmann at showdown with town officials.
Less than a year after moving into his house, Johannes Boeckmann had an unpleasant awakening to life in Hamden: his taxes increased by 44 percent.
He started talking to his neighbors to see if their taxes had increased as drastically as his. They had.
So, they started to do some digging. They looked at their property cards in the town assessor’s office, and noticed that they all had something in common. They were all in an area called “Neighborhood 40” (N40).
He and other N40 residents gathered Wednesday night with Mayor Curt Leng, Assessor John Gelati, and other town and state officials to continue a long-term discussion that has left many frustrated about what they see as a lack of transparency on the part of the town. The meeting also featured Kathleen Schomaker, who recently won the Democratic nomination for the Legislative Council’s Sixth District, former Democratic mayoral candidate and Councilwoman Lauren Garrett, Councilman Justin Farmer, Republican mayoral candidate Jay Kaye, Council Minority Leader Marjorie Bonadies, and State Rep. Mike D’Agostino.
Boeckmann’s was one of about 300 southern Hamden properties designated in the 2015 revaluation as a part of N40. The revaluation software had clumped areas in Hamden together into “neighborhoods” based on common trends in property sales. While many neighborhoods in Hamden saw decreases in their property assessments, N40 saw a rather hefty increase. Coupled with a mill rate hike that year, many residents saw their taxes increase by thousands of dollars to bills well over $20,000.
N40 encompasses areas on both sides of Lake Whitney in southeastern Hamden. It includes parts of North Edgehill, Whitneyville, and an area on the eastern side of Lake Whitney between the Hartford Turnpike and Ridge Road.
Boeckmann and other N40 residents have been trying to get answers about the revaluation since 2016, when they first noticed their tax bills increase. They have held multiple meetings with officials, and submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that resulted in the release of around 30,000 pages of documents.
Some N40 residents appealed their assessments to the Board of Assessment Appeals. Aley Menon said that she had to try a few times, and finally had to hire a private appraiser before the board lowered her assessment. Mike Connair took legal action to fix inaccuracies in the data used to generate his assessment. It cost him $16,500, which was more than the amount he had been overtaxed for five years.
Neighborhood “Multipliers”
John Gelati.
This year, Boeckmann and other members of the N40 steering committee finally figured out one piece they believe is to blame for the tax hike. With the help of Gelati, who came to Hamden only last year, they obtained a list of “multipliers,” or neighborhood “factors” that were used to adjust assessment values based on the location of properties. The higher the “multiplier,” the higher the assessments in the neighborhood.
N40’s “multiplier” was the highest, at 3.1, an increase of 41 percent over 2010, when it was 2.2. The next highest was for a portion of Spring Glen, at 2.0. Most hovered slightly above or below 1, and many either decreased or remained unchanged between 2010 and 2015.
“These inequalities are the things that we consider very dubious,” Boeckmann told the crowd on Wednesday.
Hamden hired Vision Government Solutions to conduct the 2015 revaluation.
“3.1 was a conclusion that [Vision] reached by applying a formula that was a mathematical analysis of values from sales of properties in the neighborhood,” said Gelati.
Justin Farmer and Curt Leng talking to an N40 resident.
He said that according to correspondence he has obtained, the formula originally produced a value of 3.7, but one of the Vision analysts decided to lower it, presumably thinking that 3.7 was unreasonably high.
“The appraisers on this revaluation felt that the values they arrived at were appropriate values,” he said.
How exactly Vision landed on these “multiplier” numbers is unclear. Boeckmann said that Vision released the numbers, but did not give any more information about how it had calculated them.
For the 2015 revaluation, Vision analyzed property sales only in the year leading up to the revaluation date. The first sale included in the analysis took place in December of 2014, the last in September of 2015.
Some residents questioned why the analysis had included sales from only the previous year, when only a handful of houses had been sold that year. Why not use sales going back five years?
Gelati was not in Hamden when the 2015 revaluation took place and said he does not know the details of how Vision carried it out. He said that revaluations rarely use sales from as far back as five years. He said that older sales are less reliable.
“Outright Hostility”
N40 resident Bruce Wexler.
It did not take long for the frustration in the basement of Whitneyville United Church of Christ to reach a boiling point on Wednesday. With the mayor in the room, residents had a place to direct their ire.
The most distressing part of this situation, said one resident who declined to give his name, was the way the town treated its citizens. He said that when residents aired their grievances about the revaluation, they were met with “if not outright hostility, a total lack of cooperation.”
“Initially they were definitely trying to stonewall us and not provide what we asked for,” said Boeckmann. He said that it took filing a FOIA request to get the administration to cooperate.
Leng said that he too had been baffled by the situation. He told the crowd that he doesn’t know what Neighborhood 40 is either. “I don’t think it’s equitable that you were taxed at the level that you were,” he said.
He admitted that communications between his administration and residents had not been great. Former Assessor Ross Murray’s ability to communicate with the public, he said, was “sub-par.”
That comment didn’t go over well with some residents in the room. It wasn’t just the assessor, it was the whole administration, said resident Bruce Wexler, “and then you tell us that your assessor was a poor communicator. That’s a joke.”
Leng told the Independent that he and his administration try to be responsive to citizens’ concerns.
“There were many individual meetings with N40, there were questions and discussions at the Whitneyville Civic Association,” he wrote in a text. “People are angry, and I completely understand that [they] are and why they are. No one should have to incur that level of spike in taxation.”
What Now?
N40’s disproportionately high tax bills may soon end — in fact, N40 may cease to exist entirely. That will all depend on how Hamden’s 2020 revaluation goes.
The town has purchased new assessment software from eQuality Valuation Services. The old Vision software is gone.
“I’m really hopeful that the work the new assessor has been doing, making many efforts very early in the process to have public meetings, to gather input from resident, in groups and individuals, demonstrated how seriously the Town takes the state mandated revaluation process,” Leng wrote to the Independent.
Gelati said that the new assessments will not take prior assessments into consideration. The old “neighborhoods,” he said, will also not be a factor in determining the new ones.
He said that the town will go out to bid for contractors this fall. Since it will be an open bidding process, Vision may bid again, and the town will have to take it into consideration.
“I certainly will be taking into consideration the revaluation company’s ability to execute the project successfully, which will include public perception,” he said.
He proposed creating a committee of residents to oversee the process, and possibly hiring an outside moderator as well.