Saint John senior hit with 93% assessment, tax hike on property

Nicola Carter challenged her elderly mother's property assessment on her Saint John home in the spring and won an $81,600 reduction — one of 1,000 property owners in the city who have so far succeeded in lowering their bills.

"We were very surprised when we saw the assessment," Carter said, whose mother, Margaret Nagle, is 91.

"It was nearly double what she would normally be paying."

Properties located on crumbling cliffs

Nagle lives on Red Head Road, where properties have been succumbing to erosion and tumbling into the Bay of Fundy for decades.

Half of her land already fell over the bank, and years ago her house was lifted and moved closer to the road to prevent it from falling as well.

But for the first time this year, Service New Brunswick somehow mistook Red Head's crumbling cliffs as valuable ocean front property and hit the elderly Nagle with a 93 per cent assessment and tax hike.

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And although that has now been retracted in full, Carter is disturbed it happened in the first place.

"There is certainly not the proper oversight. We were astonished," she said.

Using aerial photos for assessment

New Brunswick property owners have been challenging their assessment and tax bills in record numbers this year — 17,500 so far — and although Service New Brunswick will not specifically say how many of those are succeeding, public updates to its data base show a significant amount of revisions.

By early July more than 5,000 assessment reductions have been recorded on properties province-wide with 10,000 decisions still pending.

To date, most reductions appear to be concentrated in areas where Service New Brunswick launched a new automated assessment system last year called pictometry.

Carter feels that likely played a role in what happened to her mother. 

We've heard how these properties were assessed from a mile high. That does worry me.- Nicola Carter, daughter of property owner

"We've heard how these properties were assessed from a mile high. That does worry me," said Carter.

Pictometry utilizes aerial photography, computer analysis and sophisticated mathematics to calculate property values, but the results in New Brunswick have been controversial in the areas where it was used.

High error rates

Darlene McGarity and her husband challenged their property assessment this spring and recently won a $39,400 reduction.

That makes them one of more than 40 homeowners in their east Saint John neighbourhood to successfully fight their tax bill.

"They [Service New Brunswick] realized it's not worth what they said it was," said McGarity on Thursday. "It was crazy to put that amount on it." 

The McGarity's live on Topeka Street, part of a 700-property neighbourhood adjacent to the Irving Oil refinery that would have been assessed using the new system.

So far, 46 property owners in the area successfully fought their tax bills, one of several neighbourhoods in communities assessed with pictometry rife with inflated assessments.

Error rates in other neighbourhoods have been even higher 

Figures show Rothesay neighbourhoods bordered by Grove and Highland Avenue had 75 properties on eight streets winning assessment reductions to date. 

And in Moncton, 22 of 26 properties on Brookside Drive — nearly every home on the street - had its assessment reduced.

Numbers inflated

Service New Brunswick acknowledges that more properties have been winning assessment reductions this year than normal.

*as of July 7, 2017

But it also said those numbers are inflated by 2,048 homes that pictometry singled out for high assessment increases last winter, which managers then fabricated renovation amounts for to maximize their tax increases.

"Excluding the formula errors for 2017, the results of the requests for review have been within the normal range," the agency said in an email.

Property owners have until the end of next week, Aug. 1, to request an assessment review.