Slowing down not stopping
Mr. Wizard,
I am not sure what part of my comments you wanted confirmation on. Since the Columbus Monthly and the Dispatch are competitors they used different sources for their article. They indicated that Pickerington had a 1.2% increase in property values from 2006 to 2007. New Albany had a 2.6% increase over the same time.
I have talked with my neighbors and everyone that I know has received fairly substantial increases in their assessed tax values sent out by the Fairfield County Auditor last month. I doubt there is any source that is absolute in telling us how things are going. However I see trends here locally that tell me we are holding our own in property values. Come the first of the year when the auditor posts the new valuations for the school district we will know for sure then.
When Forrest Yocum was the school Superintendent he was quoted in the minutes of a Pickerington City Council meeting that for a housing project to be ?“revenue neutral?” the average home value in that project would need to be over $750,000. I suspect those minutes would have been dated around 2001. Since all of our local school revenues are based on the property valuations per student then what Mr. Yocum stated was probably pretty close to the truth. That $750,000 market value home would be assessed at 35% of that value or $262,500.
In FY 2000 (actual year of 1998) the PLSD had a property valuation per student of $78,640 per pupil. The state average that year was $100,339 per pupil. The PLSD currently has a property assessed value at over $ 1 Million. With a little over 10,000 pupils, we are slightly over the $101,000 valuation per pupil with a state average of $138,000 per pupil.
One of the problems with our schools is getting current data. As you can see fiscal year 2000 is actually data from 1998. This information comes from ODE. I suspect it is feed to them by the different school districts. Using state data we are struggling to keep up. However if the Columbus Dispatch and the Columbus Monthly are correct in their evaluations then we should see the PLSD gain this coming year on the valuations per pupil when compared to other districts in the state.
The higher that number ($$ per pupil) the lower we each of us pay in property taxes to the schools.
So how do you raise that number? Remember there is two sides to the equation. If our property values go up 10% and our school student population increases only 5% we gain on the number lower taxes. If we require higher priced homes with say impact fees and design standards we raise the value per kid. If we have a model home here in Pickerington with the same floor plan and it is $5K more than one in Reynoldsburg or Canal I think you will see less people with kids moving here. Less kids we raise the number. I saw in the Dispatch this morning that only seven houses were transferred this week in zip code 43147 and normally there are 30 or so.
The school master plan predicts that PLSD will have a school population of 10,345 this year (2007-2008). With the city and the township seeing less than half the number of building permits this year compared to last year I doubt we will see 200 new students this year. I believe that trend will continue. So I predict this school year we will have 10,211 kids in our schools. Property values up twice that.
By Oldtimer
