TOWN OF CUBA
Revaluation program moves toward completion; assessment roll is filed
CUBA — The Town of Cuba’s tentative 2009 tax roll was sent to the Allegany County Real Property Tax Office on Friday, moving a town-wide revaluation toward completion and ending some taxpayers’ hopes of scuttling the yearold project.
About 90 property owners attended an April 14 Town Board meeting to question the values assigned by J. D. Bearley Consultants. Bearley conducted the revaluation and recently completed a series of informal appeal meetings with about 300 taxpayers.
The revaluation was undertaken to bring the town’s 2,200 parcels from a 78 percent equalization rate to full market value. Complicating the process were the properties around Cuba Lake, where some of the cottages on Indian territory were purchased a few years ago at appraised market value and then returned to the Seneca Nation of Indians.
These sales, in a neighborhood where some transactions were never recorded, helped to provide data to establish uniform values for the first time. Other properties are located on the lake, where a confusing 50 feet of frontage is owned by the state and where some properties are leased.
A taxpayer advocacy group, led by Terry Keeley, who was elected to the Portville town supervisor’s post after leading a taxpayer revolt there in 2007, has campaigned against the assessment data on a Web site, www.cuba-newyork.com . The Web site lists the values before and after reassessment of the homes of town officials, town assessors and other prominent citizens, charging unfair and careless valuation. Assessment Board chairman Donald Donovan said the assessment roll was not that bad.
“A lot of people have got a lot of wrong information,” he said.
But Keeley said more than 1,000 property owners were preparing to file legal challenges on the revaluation and he suggested other lawsuits may be in the offing. In a recent letter to the assessors, the group hinted that the assessors should cancel the tentative assessment before a May 1 county filing deadline because a town officer’s law had not likely been adopted to protect elected officials in their decisions.
“That’s totally wrong,” said Town Supervisor Barbara Deming. “It was ratified Feb. 3, 1981, and the town officials are covered by insurance.”
Deming said no partiality was shown for cottage or village homeowners.
“These things are never perfect,” said Deming, noting that many of the 300 errors found in the assessments have been corrected and are listed on the town’s official Web site, www.cubany.org .
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