San Juan County Assessor Charles Zalmanek reports that the total assessed value of taxable property in San Juan County increased 13.1 percent between 2007 and 2008 to approximately $7.976 billion. That is identical to the increase during 2006 and lower than the jump in 2005 when the total taxable property value increased by 17 percent.

The increase in total value does not translate directly into higher taxes, however, because the county can only increase revenue collected from existing property by one percent per year without voter approval.

Assessor Zalmanek also noted that some of the 43 taxing entities in the county did not take their full allowable increase this year. Those include: the Port of Orcas, the San Juan and Orcas Cemetery Districts, and San Juan Island Emergency Medical Services. Only 10.5 percent of the average property tax dollar is collected for the county government’s operating fund.

To offset the higher values, the tax levy rate was reduced by amounts ranging from three percent in Friday Harbor to 17.4 percent on Orcas Island. Because roughly one-third of the properties in the county are re-assessed each year, two-thirds of the properties in the county actually pay less tax each year than the previous year. On Blakely Island property taxes will drop by $54 per $100,000 value.

“But it also means that the one-third that is re-assessed gets a pretty good bump in their assessed value to catch up with three years of market activity,” said Zalmanek. In recent years that “bump” has averaged between 40 and 50 percent.

The area in 2008 included Orcas, Waldron, Crane, Obstruction and several other non-ferry served islands. Values in those areas increased an average of 41.5 percent. That means that despite the significant drop in the tax rate on Orcas, the higher values will produce average tax bill increases of 16 percent in those areas.

“We had a record number of people who appealed their assessments this year. A lot of them felt that values had dropped significantly since the national economic problems emerged,” Zalmanek said. “But state law requires us to base our calculations on what the property was worth on January 1 of the current year and the problems had not had much of an effect on our market at that time.”

The Assessor has set up a property tax calculator on the county website that property owners can use to calculate their 2009 property tax bill and compare it to last year’s bill. It is available at: http://www.sanjuanco.com/assessor/taxcalculator.aspx.