Williams Bay Tax Ridiculousness

The Village of Williams Bay is the town that I grew up in. It’s the town that I learned to walk in. The town I learned to drive in. The town I mowed lawns in, and for the last fourteen years it’s the town that I’ve sold real estate in. For those reasons, I like Williams Bay. The Bay is like Fontana without all the polish, and yet it’s nothing like Lake Geneva with all the retail and tourist attractions. Williams Bay might not know what it’s doing or who it is, but I’ve always liked Williams Bay. Real Estate here is wonderful, and some of my favorite lake access associations like the Loch Vista Club and the Congress Club are located on its shores. Yet, try as I might to forgive the Bay for cultivating weeds along its precious shoreline, and hosting four different architectural styles of public buildings along that same lakefront, I cannot forgive Williams Bay for its most recent fumble: Deciding to enact a sweeping re-assessment of property values that almost uniformly reflect massive increases after three years of the worst real estate decline that most of us can remember.

Williams Bay needs a PR firm, and they need one quick. I’d argue they needed one about a year ago when they set this most recent tax reassessment in motion, but it’s too late for that now. Property owners from Cedar Point to Baywood Heights will be opening their mail this week to find that the village thinks their property has escalated in value even when comparable sales and common sense says otherwise. In a town where property values have, by and large, declined anywhere from 15-30% over the past three years, most of these reassessment letters will inform property owners here that their property values have increased. Each increase will be based on your specific property, but of the dozen or so that I’ve seen over the past two days, the increases seem to range from 10-35%. The new slogan for Williams Bay should be changed to “Come live here, because when real estate values decline in other towns, our values go up, up, up!”

Williams Bay, you should be ashamed of yourself. Seriously, ashamed. To pull a tax maneuver like this one in this economic climate, you’d have to be either impaired or just plain stupid, and I have a feeling you’re both. I understand the state mandates a reassessment. I get that. And I understand that mil rates generally drop when assessments go up so that the increase in tax is only marginal, even though most people will lose their minds doing quick math that wrongly assumes if their property value assessment goes up 25% then their tax bill will go up the same. Even so, the Village should have known better than to let the assessor loose without strict instructions to be aware of the market conditions that exist beyond what the MLS will tell an out of town assessor. Perhaps it would have been wise to consult with the only real estate office in town. Perhaps that might have been a nice first stop for the assessor before he came to town and blew the values out of whack and caused numerous heart palpitations amongst the residents here.

So this week, people village wide will be opening their assessment letters and reading the fictional values that the village has assigned to their properties. The village will be inundated with phone calls, and the open book on November 6th, 2010 will be flooded with rightfully angry owners. The village could have engaged in a little practical thinking and avoided all of this, but instead they chose to push an increased assessment through even though property values have declined over the same period they claim they increased. I’ll be helping numerous owners fight these assessments, and I’m more than happy to help you as well. Instead of having everyone email me at once, I’ll provide links here that will help you fight these bogus assessments.

There have been ten lakefront and lake access sales in Williams Bay this year. Those sales reflect values that are far less than the pipe dream values that Williams Bay assigned, and anyone seeking to fight their assessment would do well to print these listings off, review to gauge how they reflect on your property and go to the village prepared for a battle. If you’re a property owner who has purchased property in Williams Bay over the past 24 months, be sure to attend the open book review with your closing statement in hand. The Village should be embarrassed for forcing its residents to work this hard to justify values that should be obvious, but instead they’ll just turn a blind eye and claim that it’s the state’s fault. Perhaps the village will learn a lesson from all this insanity. Perhaps they’ll find a way to cut expenses by subcontracting their building inspector positions and some maintenance positions in an attempt at actually pairing costs instead of simply raising taxes. Much like yesterday when I said I hoped Vista Del Lago would get the pricing message, please note in this case I said “perhaps”.