Nearly 2,200 property tax notices ‘undeliverable’ in Columbus. Is your name on list?

Nearly 2,200 property tax notices mailed to owners of residential and commercial dwellings and land throughout Columbus have been returned by the U.S. Postal Service as “undeliverable,” thus prompting the city to place a list of names online to help alert taxpayers that they have addresses to correct and taxes to pay.

“The (Georgia) code section says we have to post them for 30 days, so it will be posted for at least 30 days and if somebody finds their name on there they need to contact us to get us the right mailing address so the next notice can go to them,” Betty Middleton, chief appraiser with the city’s Board of Tax Assessors office, said Thursday.

Middleton said the 2,172 returned notices — out of more than 69,000 mailed to Muscogee County property owners — are down slightly from previous years. She surmised that more people simply are updating and correcting their addresses.

Georgia law was changed in 2010 requiring that every owner of a property — be they business people or homeowners — be sent a notice by mail, a process that began in 2011. This year, the notices were mailed on May 25.

In the past, Middleton said, only a handful of property owners have gotten in touch with the Board of Tax Assessors after notices were returned undeliverable and their information was compiled on a list and posted on the city’s website. Evidently, she said, no one reads the list.

“Next year, we’ll just mail a notice to that same address and it will come back,” she said. “But with a lot of these their taxes get paid somehow.”

Ultimately, those property owners who don’t pay their taxes will find the situation escalating, with the city’s Office of Tax Commissioner becoming involved.

“If the tax bills aren’t paid, then the tax commissioner has her tax sales and, yeah, they can be sold that way,” Middleton said. “But that’s her doings.”

Those needing more information on their property taxes should either visit the Board of Tax Assessors on the second floor of the City Services Center, 3111 Citizens Way, off Macon Road, or contact the office by phone at 706-653-4398.

The undeliverable property tax notices come with John Williams, the city’s deputy chief appraiser, updating Columbus Council recently on appeals of property tax assessments.

It was last year that a revaluation/software conversion project by the city through a vendor, Tyler Technologies, led to property assessments shooting sharply higher, creating an uproar among some property owners. There were more than 10,000 appeals, which generated a logjam of reassessments and Board of Equalization hearings.

Williams said the total number of active appeals, as of Sept. 10, stands at 1,289, which is less than 2 percent of taxable real property accounts in the city and only one-half percent of the citywide total taxable digest.

“Last year at this time we were talking about 10,000 or more appeals. So it’s a welcome decrease in our office,” he said.

Of those 1,289 property tax appeals, 966 of them, or about 75 percent, have been recommended for reduction, he said, and 193 have been recommended for no change in assessed taxes due. Another 130 appeals have been certified to the Board of Equalization for hearings that start Oct. 15.

“It is our goal and hope that we are through with those BOEs (hearings) by the end of December this year, as opposed to running into May and June of this year like we did,” Williams said.

This story was originally published September 20, 2018 at 5:42 PM.