Deer Valley Resort and Talisker, Park City Mountain’s main landlord, appealed for lower property values — and therefore lower taxes — from Summit County in 2023 and 2024 and are in settlement talks.
This year, Summit County Assessor Stephanie Poll was “upset,” as the deputy county manager put it, when she learned about a line item added to Senate Bill 295, sponsored by GOP Sen. Dan McCay of Riverton.
The assessor’s job is to calculate the market value of every property — what they would sell for — for tax purposes.
Poll claimed an attorney representing both Deer Valley and Talisker asked for a few lines that “strong armed” the county.
“He absolutely asked for that language to be put in, and in multiple conversations, has said, should a settlement agreement be reached, he would be willing to have it pulled,” Poll told KPCW Feb. 27.
Until March 3, four lines in McCay’s bill may have altered a method of property appraisal called the “income method,” where assessors look at the income a property generates and use that to calculate its value.
The exact effect of those lines wasn’t clear to assessors like Poll. But she believes their primary purpose was to influence settlement talks.
She said the Utah Association of Counties dubbed the four lines a “poison pill” in an otherwise unproblematic bill.
A 1997 state audit says the income method is preferred for commercial properties.
Utah is a nondisclosure state, meaning assessors don’t always know how much properties sell for. So when it comes to market prices on commercial properties, Poll said income helps fill in the gaps.
“Without this income information, without sales information on commercial, the assessors throughout the state feel that we are low on [undervaluing] our commercial property,” she said.
Poll has previously valued Talisker’s land at $662,200,000 and Deer Valley’s land at $321,800,000. She couldn’t quantify the exact amount they’re disputing, but a tax break on properties that expensive could mean thousands in savings.
Utah’s property tax system is a zero-sum game. Taxing entities must collect the same amount of money each year unless they go through a public process to raise taxes.
If they don’t, residential tax bills can still go up or down year to year because property values change. What that means is: when one person’s property value goes up and their neighbor’s doesn’t, the first person’s taxes go up while the neighbor’s taxes go down.
Statewide, undervaluing commercial property has raised some residents’ property taxes. Assessors call it a “tax shift.”
A stark Summit County example is on Chalk Creek Road in northern Summit County. Residences there have become more valuable, but oil fields haven’t kept pace. Now, nine households pay thousands in property taxes to maintain the road oil companies were supposed to pay for.
Something analogous could happen across Summit County if resort property values don’t increase as much as homes.
Deer Valley and Talisker have yet to settle their Summit County tax appeals and neither responded to KPCW’s requests for comment on McCay’s bill last week.
The senator also didn’t respond to requests for comment during or after the legislative session, so the reason for the reversal is unclear.
He did speak to it in the House Revenue and Taxation Committee.
“We've removed that portion from the bill in the second substitute, so the second substitute doesn't deal with the income approach as it relates to property. We had two different opinions on how that should be done, and what ended up winning out was the parties meeting and talking and coming up with some progress on their own,” McCay told committee members March 3. “The language that was in the bill really just mirrored language that was in a tax commission decision related to the issue.”
Poll said she and other assessors want to fix the residential-commercial imbalance, a process she terms “equalization.”
She thanked Sen. McCay at the March 3 committee meeting for his past efforts to increase real estate disclosures and for removing the ski resort line item.
“We have been in forward motion with our taxpayer and hoping to settle, quickly as we can,” Poll said. “We still have a little bit of a spread in our values, but we hope to continue working forward with that and reach an agreement that we can both feel good about.”
Poll declined to share the name of the attorney representing Deer Valley and Talisker in their appeal. KPCW was unable to independently identify the lawyer.
