The St. John-based V.I. Unity Day Group this week asked the V.I. Superior Court to issue a temporary restraining order against the local government to stop it from collecting 2013 property taxes.
“To sum it up, the 2013 tax bill is criminal,” St. John resident Myrtle Barry, who chairs the Unity Day Group’s property tax committee, said Friday.
While there are likely unhappy property taxpayers on all islands, St. John was particularly hard hit. Barry said many of the property valuations are far beyond what the home owner could get for the house if sold.
“The values skyrocketed beyond what is realistic,” she said.
Barry said people want to pay their property taxes, but want to pay what is “fair and right.”
She said the property values used to calculate the St. John tax bills are flawed because they are based on average sales. Properties owned by local residents don’t often sell and some neighborhoods had no sales at all. This means the values used to create the valuation models are flawed because they’re based on the sale prices of pricy vacation villas.
“All of the high dollar sales belong to the investor class. The local class, with mostly low dollar properties, almost never sells because there is nowhere else to move to except off of St. John,” the suit notes.
Making the matter even more complex, the suit notes that properties owned by full-time residents are located in the same neighborhoods as vacation villas. For example, the suit notes that in one neighborhood, one property sold for $690,000 and another for $3.5 million.
According to Shawna Richards, spokeswoman at the Lieutenant Governor’s office, as of this week, 458 tax payers on St. Thomas, 402 on St. Croix and 505 on St. John asked for informal appeals of their property assessments. This means someone from the tax assessor’s office visits a property to reassess its value.
Barry thought the St. John number was on the low side because the Unity Day Group alone submitted over 500 informal appeal requests to the Lieutenant Governor’s office.
While the numbers appear large on all three islands, the 505 for St. John stands out because of the island’s low number of houses compared to the other two islands.
The suit points out that over half the houses on St. John are in the vacation villa market. While the villa owners are expected to pay hotel occupancy and gross receipts tax, the properties are assessed as residential not commercial like hotels.
Richards said that property taxpayers have until Dec. 23 to request an informal appeal to have their properties revalued. She said that was also the deadline for a formal appeal to the Board of Tax Review. Richards said she didn’t know when people who requested an informal appeal or had an inspector visit their house will find out the new value of their house.
Members of the V.I. Unity Day Group gathered reams of information. Barry said they solicited tax bills from residents and poured over the property tax data on the Lieutenant Governor’s website to come up with solid data to back up their claims that St. John residents are unfairly taxed.
According to the suit, land values are assigned on topography, with those at a higher elevation worth more. However, the valuations fail to take in account property description, house style, house quality and house condition.
Barry said until the Legislature comes up with a system of fairly valuing properties, the government should collect taxes based on the 1998 valuations. This is what happened until a suit bought by commercial property owners on St. Thomas that came to be known as the Berne case was finally resolved.
The Unity Day Group filed suit after the government issued bills in 2008 that the members viewed as inconsistent with what the properties are worth. Barry said that the issue went to mediation but when it became clear that the mediator wasn’t considering the Unity Day Group’s side of the story, the members left the meeting. She said U.S. District Court Judge Curtis Gomez later dismissed the suit as moot. This dismissal came in the wake of the Berne case settlement.
Barry suggested that property owners pay $1 toward their tax bill as a protest until the court renders a decision on the suit.
The suit also claims that Tax Assessor Ira Mills is unqualified for the job because he doesn’t have the required certification.
Barry and others have vowed to fight the government on the property tax matter.
“I’m not going anywhere. There is nowhere to go. I’m fighting tooth and nail,” Barry said.
The Unity Day Group, a registered non-profit organization, has raised money to fund the suit but still needs more. Send a check made out to the Unity Day Group, P.O. Box 371, St. John, VI 00830 or drop it off at the E&C Gas Station office in Enighed, where Barry is the manager of the family-owned business.
