Tax representatives for Park City Mountain and Deer Valley Resort appealed their property valuations last year to lower their Summit County property tax bills.
Summit County Assessor Stephanie Poll said Summit County’s portion of Deer Valley is valued at $321,800,000 and Park City Mountain, including Canyons Village is $662,200,000.
At private hearings June 20 and 27, third-party officers ruled those property values should stand, rejecting the resorts’ appeals.
The Summit County Council ratified those results at a public meeting July 31.
A staff report from the county auditors said the resorts submitted spreadsheets, letters, comps and other information in their defenses.
Poll has not been able to quantify the exact dollar amount Park City and Deer Valley disputed.
One reason is because their tax representatives didn’t appeal all resort parcels, just some of them. The other is that, according to Poll, the resorts have appealed again, this time to the Utah State Tax Commission.
She declined to comment further since the appeals remain open but has previously characterized the requested tax break as “significant.”
Park City Mountain and Deer Valley’s appeals come after a few difficult years of property value increases.
In a speech to local Democratic party members earlier this year, Poll said the assessor's office failed to consistently assess Summit County properties before she took office.
“But over the course of the last three years, our office has realized a value increase of nearly $32 billion for Summit County, primarily from large corporations and luxury secondary homes,” Poll said at the Democratic county convention.
She calls that effort “equalization.”
And because the county can’t collect more money from property taxpayers as a whole without voter approval, if one property jumps in value one year, another property that didn’t increase pays less by comparison.
It’s now up to state tax authorities to say whether Park City Mountain and Deer Valley’s property value increases were justified.
Neither resort immediately responded to a request for comment Thursday.
