Photo by Rachel Doktor.
Two days after more than 100 local residents turned up at a town of Pembroke board meeting to protest increased property assessments, the board voted in an emergency session on Saturday to roll back the increase for 2024.
Assessments will remain at the 2023 levels for 2024, said Supervisor Thomas C. Schneider Jr.
Property owners will receive written notice of the rollback to the 2023 assessments.
All scheduled meetings with the town's assessor have been canceled. A taxpayer information session scheduled for Wednesday was also canceled.
So many people turned out at Thursday's board meeting that the session was relocated from the board's chambers on Main Road to the Town Hall in the village of Corfu.
Rachel Doktor attended the meeting and provided The Batavian with photos of the full house. She said people are reporting the same experience she's had -- an astronomical assessment increase.
"Ours was raised over $100,000 just last year, and now they want another $84,000," Doktor said on Friday. "Basically, they're raising our assessments like crazy, and they're doing it again ... everyone is pissed about the assessment."
Doktor said she thinks property values have been going up because people are moving to the area from Buffalo and Rochester and "overpaying" for their new homes.
"All of these city people, they buy a huge home for $250,000 that in Rochester could cost a million dollars," Doktor said.
Realtor.com currently lists one house for sale in Pembroke, a three-bedroom, one-bath, 2,208-square-foot residence on South Lake Road for $249,500. A newer but smaller home sold in March for nearly $370,000, but other home sales in the area have been below that price.
Schneider said his own assessment has gone up $350,000. He said the factors driving up home prices include the desirability of the Pembroke Central School District, Pembroke's proximity to Erie County, and easy access to the Thruway.
Pembroke has been a hotbed of growth the past couple of years, with new apartment buildings going up, a new mixed-use development opening, a new distribution center by the interchange, and a planned new travel plaza.
Property by the interchange, Schneider said, is going for $30,000 an acre. He expressed concern that those high commercial property values may have played too big of a role in determining residential property assessments. That was why he suggested on Friday, before the emergency meeting on Saturday, that a rollback to 2023 assessments might be in order.
"That needs to be looked at as part of the increase in her calculations," Schneider said.
The assessor is appointed for a seven-year term, and outside of hiring the assessor, the town board has no role in assessments, Schneider said.
"The board should remain independent of the assessor," Schneider said. "We don't want politicians assigning values to properties in my opinion and in the state's opinion, too."
The rollback, Schneider said, will allow a reassessment of the assessments.
"We need to dig into the data and see if there are structural deficiencies (in the calculations)," Schneider said. "We will roll it back for a year and talk with the assessor about where things might have gone awry."
