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California Property Tax Rolls Shrink 1.8% in `Historic' Slump
California property values fell 1.8 percent for the current fiscal year, only the second drop since the most-populous U.S. state began collecting the data in 1933.
Declines in 48 of the state’s 58 counties brought the total value to $4.37 trillion, according to the California Board of Equalization, which monitors tax collections. The previous drop was a year earlier, when the total sank 2.4 percent to $4.45 trillion, the California Assessors’ Association said.
“This is historic,” Larry Stone, the assessor for Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “This is not your normal downturn.”
In January assessments, most California property values were adjusted down by 0.237 percent to reflect deflation, the state board said. The adjustment was the first to lower property tax bills because of a formula put in place by Proposition 13, a 1978 referendum that capped property-tax increases.
State law requires assessors to lower values during market downturns, Stone said. In his county, assessments declined on 118,000 homes as a result.
Property values fell 1.8 percent to $1.06 trillion in Los Angeles County and 0.5 percent to $421.2 billion in Orange County, the two with the largest property rolls, state data show. Assessments declined on almost 70 percent of residences reviewed in Los Angeles County, Assessor Robert Quon said last month in a statement explaining the drop.
San Francisco Gains
In San Francisco County and Kern County, an oil-producing region in central California, values increased more than 4 percent. San Francisco property values rose 4.3 percent to $158.5 billion, according to state records.
Stone said the highest jobless rate in 50 years drove down Santa Clara County property, calling it “the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.” Assessed values fell 21 percent in 1978, when passage of Proposition 13 caused a reevaluation of all California real estate.
Tax rolls fell 2.4 percent to $296 billion in Santa Clara last year, according to the county’s 2010 annual report. In 2001, at the apex of the Internet boom, values rose 16 percent.
In Mono County, lake country near the Sierra Nevada range, property values fell 7 percent, the state said.
“We have a lot of second homes,” Mono County Assessor Jody Henning said in a telephone interview. “They are the first to go.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Christopher Palmeri in Los Angeles at cpalmeri1@bloomberg.net.
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