The Wisconsin Policy Forum is proposing a new joint commission to assess property in Milwaukee County, which could lead to more “timely, accurate and uniform” assessments and other benefits with a trade-off of higher costs.
That’s according to the group’s latest report on this topic, which notes Wisconsin is the only state among its immediate Midwest neighbors to have all property assessed at the municipal level, aside from manufacturing parcels.
Milwaukee County’s 19 different cities and villages each separately conduct property assessments, and only the cities of Milwaukee, Wauwatosa and West Allis have in-house assessor’s offices. Other municipalities in the county contract with private firms for this work.
“This approach means that most Wisconsin municipalities bring relatively small economies of scale to the process of determining property values,” authors wrote.
They noted various challenges with this system, from a confusing patchwork of assessment practices to the limited number of contract assessors working in the area, as well as staffing issues for assessors and accuracy of individual property-level data.
WPF questions whether assessments in the county “are updated frequently enough to capture important changes in the market for different classes of property and neighborhoods.”
As one potential alternative, the report lays out a framework for pooling resources among some of the county’s municipalities and forming a consortium tasked with assessing properties for participating communities. Its governance model is patterned on a local animal control services commission, which has operated for more than 25 years.
Authors say forming such a commission would likely result in “more timely, accurate and uniform” assessments, more data on commercial properties, greater expertise and specialization among staff, better responsiveness to property owner concerns and more planning resources.
“For example, this approach would likely support a process to bring property values in each member community up to market prices every other year,” they wrote. “The main drawback of the commission under this model would be the cost.”
WPF warns this approach could lead to a “substantial increase” in costs for nearly all of the 16 municipalities that currently use a contract assessor.
The report includes modeling for various approaches, including several for providing in-house assessment by the commssion. For in-house options, authors expect such a commission would serve municipalities that have prioritized greater accuracy and more frequent revaluations, and have been willing to bear a higher cost burden for these improvements.
Ultimately, despite the higher costs, WPF argues “there appear to be potential gains from working with neighboring communities” either through the in-house approach or contracted assessment.
