Appraising a taxing situation
While the rest of Texas has had weeks to recuperate from the initial shock of their 2022 Notice of Appraised Value, Grimes County residents experienced their seismic event just this past Friday. As one well-known Navasota elected official said, “I nearly fainted!” I would imagine that right now the Grimes Central Appraisal District (GCAD) is about as popular as Harris County Elections Administration upon discovering 10,000 mail ballots weren’t entered into the count on primary election night! I certainly had a lot of thoughts whirling around in my head.
I’ve never liked the phrase “what the market will bear.” I always thought the smartest people were the ones who managed to get the price down. I mean, why are sales so popular? Because we’re getting something we want for less than it was originally offered. For many years, there was a certain smugness in buying cheap. HGTV fared quite well teaching viewers how to DIY and save money, or to artfully substitute discount store or junk yard finds to create an upscale look.
When it comes to land and housing, the rules seem to change. I’m not a realtor, landman or an economist. I’m just a property owner caught in a squeeze. I don’t know who to trust or who to believe. I’m just trying to figure out how we got here seemingly overnight and how I’m going to survive it. One thought I had is that
One thought I had is that landowners or their heirs just got greedy and threw a dollar value out there to see what would stick. Then along came buyers desperate to get out of the cesspool of liberality that their town or state had become. Blessed with the financial resources to do so, they paid whatever was asked.
Another theory of mine is that this land thing is a scheme perpetrated by public figures with more money than God. Call me a conspiracy theorist but I feel like we’ve been living the definition for the past two years.
“Scheme - a large-scale systematic plan or arrangement for attaining a particular object or putting a particular idea into effect.” The “idea” in this case is socialism and government dependency. The current land scheme resulting in high property taxes is capable of causing honest hard-working Texans and retirees who want nothing more than to live out their lives in peace, to lose their homes, end up on the street and dependent on government handouts. If you can buy district attorney elections in large urban areas, you can certainly afford to manipulate land prices.
Shifting gears, I’m a little uncomfortable with the makeup of our county’s Appraisal Review Board (ARB), the folks you have to convince that your property was inaccurately appraised. Point of information: the taxing entities select the GCAD board of directors and the BODs appoint the ARB members.
Navasota, which has about a third of the county population and is the area with the largest concentration of property owners in Grimes County, has no representation on the ARB. Unless the GCAD has failed to update its website, no ARB members live within the Navasota city limits. They all live out in the county and four of the five own two or more properties on acreage.
I imagine city and county properties are appraised by different standards, sort of like evaluating apples and oranges. Perhaps no Navasotan wants the contention which comes with the job but frankly, I’d like to see one person on the board who understands my apple and is not determining the validity of my protest through the lens of an orange!
As property owners and taxpayers, we have two options right now. Do nothing and pray the madness ends or get our paperwork together and file a protest if we think we were unfairly assessed.
In the words of Sam Houston, the Father of Texas, “Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may.”
The column represents the thoughts and opinions of Connie Clements. Opinion columns are NOT the opinion of the Navasota Examiner.
Clements is a freelance reporter for the Navasota Examiner and an award-winning columnist.