Politics & Government

Taxes Too High? Blame the Former Assessor

Documents obtained by Patch illustrate errors and omissions by the former Mount Pleasant village assessor, that left $4.5 million off the tax rolls, resulting in higher tax rates for village property owners.

Property taxes could hold steady or even decrease in 2013, now that the village has added $4.5 million in unassessed property value to its tax rolls.

The value comes from residents who made significant renovations or additions to their homes between 2008 and 2010, but never saw their assessment go up; that new value was never added to the tax base. These errors and omissions were discovered last year, and were traced back to what the village says was unacceptable work by former trustee and village assessor Ed Potter and his company, Southeastern Wisconsin Assessment Services LLC.

Potter resigned from the Village Board in 2007 to go after the assessor contract. He got the job, but needed someone to help out. In January 2011 he hired subcontractor Dan McHugh, who has 16 years of assessment experience, including some municipal work. Shortly after his hire, McHugh noticed irregularities in the assessment process.

Potter and McHugh met almost weekly during the first few months, to keep tabs on work being done or things that needed to be addressed. But then, both men said, the meetings tapered off.

"I was really busy with appraisals, and Dan was really busy with assessing," Potter told Patch. Potter also has an appraisal business, E.F. Potter Appraisal.

McHugh dug into the irregularities.

Irregularities Lead to Lost Revenue

As McHugh looked into the appraisal process, he discovered extensive errors. He then went to the management team of interim Administrator Ron Meyer and Village President Carolyn Milkie.

According to McHugh, Potter was increasingly hard to reach.

"At that point everything was in the past, and I knew we couldn't recover the lost values," McHugh said. "Ed was the owner of Southeastern Wisconsin Assessment Services, but he had no day-to-day role in what I was doing in Mount Pleasant.”

He outlined the errors in January in a memo sent to Meyer:

  • 12 properties missing entirely from the assessment roll;
  • 15 corrections from the annual Board of Review, resulting in refunds in the thousands of dollars;
  • 116 property improvements for everything from a renovated kitchen to an addition, new garage, etc.;
  • Hundreds of properties are missing all their data, which his required by the Department of Revenue;
  • Inconsistent data like quality of construction and property condition in neighborhoods among similar properties; and
  • Inaccurate data stemming from software conversion and what McHugh calls “the failure to clean up the data thereafter.”

Patch received a copy of the memo, information about the assessor contract and other documents related to the village’s assessor service providers through an open records request.

Milkie was surprised at the number of errors and omissions. As for why there wasn't more oversight from the village, she thought former administrator Mike Andreasen was providing it.

"As a contract employee, there wasn't a lot of oversight, but I would have expected our former administrator to question the decrease in property values," she said. "Some of it can be explained by the turn in the economy, but given the number of building permits, values should have increased."

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