State rollback won't have big effect in Plymouth County

This year's assessment limitations or rollback on Iowa property values announced by the Iowa Department of Revenue in October won't affect Plymouth County taxpayers much.

That's according to Bob Heyderhoff, county assessor.

Heyderhoff said even though it seems the difference is major between last years' statewide rollback on agricultural land of about 93.86 percent to this year's 66.27 percent, it's not going to be a big deal in Plymouth County.

"The assessed value is up, (but) the rollback is down so the taxable value won't change much," Heyderhoff said.

That means taxes won't necessarily increase depending on how the county's levies work out come budget time, Heyderhoff said.

He said 2009 is a re-evaluation year for agricultural property, meaning the state calculated new assessments based on a productivity formula.

With the re-evaluation, property assessed valuations increased about 45 percent in 2009 in Plymouth County. That was lower than the statewide calculation, which came in at 48 percent, Heyderhoff said.

For agricultural land, the 66.27 percent rollback statewide is needed to ensure taxable values don't increase more than the 4 percent allowed by the state, Heyderhoff said.

"Rollback was instituted to keep things from going up too much in one year," he said.

The 2009 assessed value for agricultural property statewide is $38 billion, taxable value of that is $25.2 billion, which is the about 66.27 percent, according to the Iowa Department of Revenue.

Other counties, like Mills, could be majorly affected because their assessed agriculture land value increase was more in 2009 than the state's 48 percent average, Heyderhoff said.

"They (Mills County) had an increase of 71 percent in assessed value so the resultant taxable increase was 20.7 percent," Heyderhoff said. "That would not mean an automatic tax increase, but if the taxing bodies wanted to raise the same tax asking then they would have to lower the levy."

Residential property statewide has an assessed value of $132.4 billion, a taxable value of $62.1 billion, which is about 46.90 percent of the assessed value.

Last year's rollback for residential property was 45.59 percent.

Residential property includes farm dwellings.

No adjustments are ordered for commercial, industrial, railroad and utility classes because their assessed values did not increase enough to qualify for reductions, according to the department of revenue.

Statewide rollbacks were first applied in 1978 with 6 percent growth allowed for the taxable values of agricultural and residential property.