Plenty protest their Cedar Rapids property values; not all win

Protesting your local property bill worked this year for owners of 1,389 residences, 50 businesses and two industries with the resulting loss in Cedar Rapids property-tax value of $31.8 million.

That dollar amount is about one-third of 1 percent of the city's $8.79 billion in property value, City Assessor Scott Labus noted on Friday.

Far from every protesting property owner got his or her way. Getting the Board of Review to decrease a property's value isn't automatic. In fact, 1,607 residential owners were turned down as were 415 commercial owners and 20 industries.

Another 553 owners of residential property saw their property values decrease at the initiation of the Board of Review based on new data and on the success of some of the protests, Labus said.

The total number of residential protests in the board's session this year was significantly larger than in recent years, 2,999 (plus the additional 553 properties the board acted on without protests) in 2010, compared to 752, 959 and 1,638 in the three prior years.

Commercial protests also were up – 465 compared to 124, 62 and 114 the three previous year – as were industrial protests – 22 compared to 9, 3 and 12 in the previous three years.

City Assessor Scott Labus said the jump in residential protests came in part because the city adjusted its property values this year to reflect new state of Iowa guidelines and then equalized the values among properties in 173 micro-neighborhoods that the Assessor's Office uses for in determining property values.

Earlier this year, Labus sent out new property values to the city's 46,000 property owners, which overall sent the increase in residential values up 5.7 percent. Such an increase, no doubt, prompted protests, he said.

Labus said the increased number of residential protests also were the result of property owners who have converted what had been apartment buildings into condominiums. When that happens, what might have been a protest from one commercial building in years past now could have been 300 residential-unit protests, he said.

Labus noted that some protests this year came from those who were displeased that the value of their property actually had declined.

Board of Review