Elected property appraisers in Florida's old days knew keeping the job required inaccuracy.
Property owners wanted their homes, land and businesses appraised for tax purposes at far below market value. Most property appraisers delivered.
That created a fool's bargain. With all values in a county set low, city and county commissioners compensated by setting millage rates high. The game was a wash.
And if your property's taxable value was ever somehow set close to its real value, you had no recourse. Though gouged by comparison, you couldn't say your property was overvalued. It wasn't. And that left elected property appraisers free to be arbitrary.
It's a good thing state reforms and oversight by the Department of Revenue drastically curtailed routine undervaluing. Now, despite mistakes and odd decisions, the usual aim of every county's appraiser is to calculate market values accurately.
That's why Bill Furst's approach made me wince when I first heard about it.
Furst wants to unseat fellow Republican Jim Todora, the Sarasota County property appraiser.
Todora is no politician. He's as colorful as the average accountant, a number-crunching bean counter who doesn't know how to play to the crowd at all.
Otherwise, the death of the real estate boom would have inspired Todora to announce an intention to lower appraised values ASAP. Instead, he irritated people by warning them not to expect much in the way of lowered tax appraisals.
His approach can be lauded as proper and professional. Property appraisers should be sticklers, not charmers. But Todora actually seems to have erred the other way. Some things he has said sounded as if he thinks the real estate downturn was more hype than reality.
Some property appraisers have cited hordes of For Sale signs as evidence of drastic market value drops, but Todora has actually cited some neighborhoods' dearth of sales as reason for not lowering his appraisals. Without recent sales as a price comparison, he has said, there's little legal evidence for downsizing values.
So there is reason to be frustrated with Todora, and Furst, as a challenger, can rightly be expected to focus on Todora's apparent under-reaction to the market.
But Furst is actually daring to promise that instead of going for the most accurate appraisals, he would aim for the lowest possible ones.
I first took that as a not-so-subtle pitch for putting bad-old-days style politics into what should be as non-political a job as possible.
I still wonder. But after talking to Furst, I'd say he seems to mean only that he would aim to never overappraise anyone.
While Todora boasts of a state audit that says his appraisals average 98.3 percent of full market value -- an apparent sign of competent professionalism -- Furst says that average is too good.
It means Todora has set many properties too high, Furst says. Better to average 90 percent, he insists. After all, state law calls for deducting the usual cost of selling a property.
Furst figures that to be about 10 percent, with sales commissions or ads sprucing up costs.
Todora is calling Furst's claims smoke and mirrors, and says the challenger is misleading voters into thinking he can cut their taxes. But, actually, Furst's approach might do just that for many people.
Most longtime homesteaders would feel no benefit, but second-homers and landlords and business owners and first-time Florida home buyers certainly might.
And if Furst doesn't push it too far, his approach might even come closer to doing what state law seems to require.
Tom Lyons can be contacted at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com
or (941) 361-4964.
Last modified: May 20, 2008 6:03am