Each year, county assessors must determine every property’s fair market value. That assessment is made based on the sale of comparable properties, what it might cost to replace the property and on the income the property could produce.
The county clerk or auditor uses the assessments to calculate how much a property owner owes in taxes.
The lawsuit against Wasatch County alleges county assessors did not assess every property and therefore broke the law. If the county assessor does not follow the law, the State Tax Commission steps in. The lawsuit alleges the State Tax Commission did nothing and subsequently also broke the law.
“I don't want to imply anybody is trying to be a bad person, trying to break the law," said Bill Quapp, a former mechanical engineer who helped put the lawsuit together. "But the system has failed to do what its statutory responsibilities are. And that is to assess all properties annually on an equitable basis.”
He has lived in Wasatch County for more than 10 years and started analyzing tax data in August of 2022 after he received an abnormally large tax assessment.
“My property went up 166% over the 2021 tax year, and my tax bill went up 112%," Quapp said. "So I was, needless to say, taken aback a bit on that. It seemed like a huge increase for one year.”
He then decided to look into how his neighbors’ taxes had changed, building a spreadsheet based on publicly available tax bills.
“The pattern was pretty clear that most subdivisions got a substantial increase, and some subdivisions seemed to get no change in their tax bases that year. And that didn't seem right," Quapp said. "As I dug into the issues even more and more, I basically learned that only a portion of the taxpayers got reassessed.”
He said he analyzed more than 26,000 properties. Quapp found 59% of Wasatch County property owners had a large increase in their assessed value from 2021 to 2022, and were “disproportionately burdened” with higher taxes. However, 34% were not reassessed and saw no change. He said the other 7% were either new properties or had tax reductions for a different reason.
Wasatch County Assessor Todd Griffin would not comment on the lawsuit but did discuss how properties are assessed. He said up until two years ago, Utah law required a property reassessment once every five years.
But he said the law has been clarified. Now every property must be reassessed every year and must have a detailed review once every five years.
Griffin said neighborhoods are often assessed as a whole because there aren’t enough staff to assess each property individually.
“There's no way to have a perfect system that just doesn't exist,” he said. “The software programs we have now are adequate. It just takes people to run them, and that won't ever be replaced.”
Some neighborhoods might see jumps in value because they had not been reassessed properly for a long time. Griffin said before he took office, there were neighborhoods whose values hadn’t changed in five or 10 years.
“Those people actually received a little bit of a deal for years,” he said. “Trying to get everything cured, it's going to cause significant increases in market values.”
There are also instances where property values don’t change at all because a neighborhood’s value stayed static.
Another factor is when counties are short-staffed. Griffin said that happened in 2022 when a Wasatch appraiser suddenly passed away.
“Part of their market area wasn't reassessed like it should have been, just because they passed away, and there was nobody to fill the spot and they passed away right before we closed our values for the year,” Griffin said.
Despite the rough year in 2022, he said the assessor’s office is now fully staffed.
