Graham’s mayor Jennifer Talley spoke with her characteristic self-assurance this week as she reprimanded the county’s tax office over the purported inaccuracy of its commercial property assessments.
Talley went on to allege that the tax office’s errors have put the city of Graham in a position where it is forced to consider a property tax increase to make up for the revenue it’s lost from commercial and industrial property owners.
“I do strongly feel that the city council should send some kind of resolution or request to the Alamance County tax office about the revaluation,” she went on to declare on Tuesday as Graham’s city manager unveiled a proposed spending plan that calls for a 2-cent hike in the city’s property tax rate. “There’s no way that it’s right. It’s making the residential residents pay more than their fair share…and we need to do something about that.”
Despite the populist appeal of Talley’s saber-rattling about commercial tax values, her underlying claims aren’t borne out by the past statements of county officials.
According to a succession of county tax administrators, the ultimate goal of any evaluation is to capture the actual market value of a particular property when the assessment occurs. Talley, meanwhile, repeatedly invoked building permits, which may include cost estimates for particular jobs, as a reliable barometer of tax value.
“No one can sit here and justify [the county’s valuation of] Lowe’s or any of the big buildings,” she insisted. “Just look at the permits.”
Talley went on to recount a conversation she once had with Jeremy Akins, who served as the county’s tax administrator when the county’s last mass revaluation occurred in 2023. The mayor recalled that she had urged Akins to reassess some of the county’s larger commercial facilities, only to have him point to the inevitable legal battle that would come in the wake of a unilateral reappraisal by the county.
“I said ‘how are they going to sue when they themselves pulled a building permit and said what the value is,” the mayor went on to recall. “You can actually request that be done on an annual basis if you believe something to be inaccurate,” she added. “I would put my hand to paper and say it is absolutely inaccurate, and I do not have to be an appraiser to know it.”
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Lost in Talley’s metaphorical call to arms was the fact that Akins himself approached the board of commissioners in the fall of 2023 with a proposal to reassess the tax values of several big box retailers.
The county’s then-tax administrator credited this idea to a pugnacious one-time candidate for the board of commissioners who had presented him with a cogent argument that the tax office had undervalued the Lowe’s Home Improvement center in Burlington during the countywide revaluation earlier that year. Akins went on to present nine other big box locations whose tax values he had also come to suspect, and he asked the commissioners for permission to hire an out-of-house firm to conduct its own appraisals as a potential prelude to adjusting these tax values.
When he first pitched this proposal, Akins warned the commissioners that a county-initiated adjustment would most likely touch off a legal battle with the large, well-funded corporations that own these retail locations. The commissioners nevertheless authorized him to retain Newmark Valuation, which county officials had described as the “gold standard” in commercial appraisals, to appraise these 10 properties in the event that they go to war with the big boxes.
Akins returned to the commissioners with the results of Newmark’s assessments in the spring of 2024. Yet, the firm’s expert appraisals sapped much of the enthusiasm that the commissioners had for a clash with the crème de la crème of the retail industry.
“Of the 10 values under review,” Akins declared in his report to the board, “five were determined to be correct…Two showed a small amount of variance…and three showed a significant amount of variance.”
The tax administrator added that the cumulative cost of the county’s appraisal errors came to about $64,500 a year in lost tax revenue, or about .0002568 cents on the tax rate.
“For the average homeowner, that is 68 cents a year,” the tax administrator added, “and that helps me to picture the scale of the impact.”
Akins went on to add that the implementation of Newmark’s “corrected” values would ineluctably trigger appeals to North Carolina’s Property Tax Commission, which he admitted has consistently ruled in favor of big box retailers who’ve challenged their property tax assessments. He added that, even if Alamance County was to buck the odds and win these appeals, the cost in legal fees would probably offset any potential gains in property tax revenue.
Although Talley failed to recall any of these complications on Tuesday, the outcome of the county’s proposed bout with the big boxes wasn’t lost on Tom Boney, Jr., the editor and publisher of The Alamance News. Boney, who was on hand for that evening’s council meeting, spoke up during the mayor’s homily to remind her about the results of the county’s experience.
“The commissioners did have that discussion,” he observed, “and their ultimate conclusion was that it would be legally risky and financially marginal to do something for these ten or so largest buildings.”
Talley remained undeterred by the publisher’s caution – insisting that the commissioners were essentially handed a bill of goods by their former tax administrator.
“I believe that they were given incorrect information, and I believe if they actually sat down and looked at the permits [they would change their conclusions],” she said. “I don’t believe everything that some staff person gets up there to say…I have done the math, and I would hold up my math to anything they say.
“We have a new assessor that just took office last month,” Talley reminded the rest of the council, “and I would like us to draft something for the city manager to send to them and have them do a reevaluation.”
The council went on to accede to the mayor’s recommendation.
