Revaluation investigation findings to be revealed Tuesday

CHARLOTTE — Attention, property owners: The findings of an investigation into the controversial 2011 Mecklenburg County revaluation will be revealed at 3 p.m. Tuesday.

After 15 weeks of holding community meetings and examining hundreds of revaluation cases, officials at Pearson’s Appraisal Services will present a summary of their findings at a county Board of Commissioners meeting. The county hired Pearson’s to review the 2011 revaluation after after the county received a flood of complaints about high property values.

The Wilson-based company held meetings, which ran from 90 minutes to four hours apiece, in the six county commission districts, Pearson’s representative Emmett Curl said at a commissioners meeting last week.

Pearson’s studied properties from 151 neighborhoods that were chosen at random and 52 that had the highest average increases in values, Curl said.

Pearson’s employees also examined 375 individual properties, also picked at random.

Although most of the objections to the 2011 revaluation have come from homeowners, the new values have also raised the hackles of apartment, shopping center and office building owners.

Curl said commercial real estate revaluations also went through a rigorous review by Pearson’s, which examined the much-discussed income-based approach that the county used in 2011 to assess commercial property values. It was the first time the county had used an income-based approach for commercial properties.

The county has 355,000 parcels of land, 20,000 to 30,000 of them commercial, Curl said.

Tuesday’s presentation is expected to be repeated over the next week at community meetings in the six districts, Curl said. Feedback from commissioners and residents attending the district meetings will be incorporated into Pearson’s final report, which is scheduled to be released Nov. 20.

Although the lame-duck Board of Commissioners will change from a Republican majority to a Democratic majority Dec. 3, thanks to the results of this month’s elections, sitting commissioners have expressed a desire to act on the study because criticism of the 2011 revaluation has been aimed at them.

Tuesday’s meeting will be in Room 267 of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, 600 E. Fourth St.

Tony Brown can be reached at [email protected], (704) 247-2912 or on Twitter at @tonymecktimes.