Good morning Cheyenne…
This weekend our pages were spammed again by a fake account. That is ok. But in reading what this person said, we do have to admit that a “charge” was leveled at our assessor by someone’s comment on this page and we haven’t addressed it properly. So here it goes.
First, we don’t want to bash anyone. Our personal history is in the courts, local to international. We believe in evidence and showing everyone that evidence so they can make educated decisions.
Earlier this month one comment said, “our assessor lowered the property taxes in her local town while raising everyone else”. Before we commented on that, we looked into it and yes, it appears that way. We did however forget to follow that up with a post as to why it appears that way. So here it is and we are sorry for not posting this immediately after that person’s comment.
This is an excerpt from a May 2022 report from TERC. TERC is a commission set up by the Nebraska legislature in 1996 to basically “overwatch” the county’s tax issues.
In the report, page 10 top paragraph it does indeed note that while most of the taxes in Cheyenne County went up the area of Gurley received a 30% discount. And it is true that our assessor lives in Gurley. This is not bashing. This is fact and corroborated by the TERC commission report. There may be a perfected good explanation for this, but we haven’t seen any as of yet, and we are continuing to look into this.
We have put a link to the entire report from the Commission at the bottom of this post so everyone can read it for themselves.
We can further back this up with a sale of a home on Road 117 in Gurley in May of this year for $305,000. Zillow had a value of $308,000. The assessor has a value of $173,177. This is substantially lower than the actual selling price of the home. We are not finding examples like this in other areas of Cheyenne County, including Dalton and Lodgepole, but we are still checking.
This is a fact. We are not bashing. We are presenting facts that hopefully the residents of Cheyenne County can use when making decisions for their future. We will try to be a little more clear and more timely with our evidence when statements are made.
It is our intention to shine some light around and help the people of Cheyenne County make more informed decisions. September is Nebraska’s Truth in Taxation month so we have a lot coming very soon! Watch the page!
Commission Report