The Augusta-Richmond County Board of Assessors discussed post-storm assessments during its regular monthly meeting, Monday afternoon.
Chief Appraiser Scott Rountree told the board that the tax assessor’s office staff, partnering with other county departments, such as the Emergency Management Agency, is undertaking a countywide canvassing of the severity of storm damage. The office is also pulling data from similar assessments by the Richmond County School Board and the Red Cross.
There are six appraisers are in the field now, Rountree said. Within three weeks, the assessor’s office hopes to have gathered enough data to share amongst all the county agencies for any given need.
“There’s a team off of Mayo Road, there’s a team in Vineland, there’s a team in National Hills,” explained Rountree to the board members. “We’ll continue to be moving south throughout the process and canvassing every single property to determine the severity of the damage on the structures, both residential and commercial and provide us constant tracking.”
Alongside evaluating physical damage, the office will also have to soon conduct ongoing studies to determine how the hurricane has impacted the market. Rountree noted, as possible outcomes, that some neighborhoods may lose inventory and prices may rise temporarily.
“If prices go up real high or drop real low, and it’s a short term thing, we want to make sure we’re accounting for that and the adjustments that we’re making annually for all appraisals,” he said. “We don’t want any outsized effect on short term issues, but we’ll continue to be tracking that through the first quarter of next year to see what the next six months look like.”
This damage assessment project entailed the release of a damage report form, available online, through which property owners could provide information—including financial—on how the storm specifically affected them, describing damages, estimates, repair timelines and other relevant details.
The form is one of many tools the assessor’s office will use to filter out which reviews it will actually need to conduct throughout its discovery process. While completing the form may eventually result in decreased taxes next year for some because of damage done to property, Rountree stressed that it is not a tax reduction form.
“We don’t set the taxes,” Rountree said, underscoring the assessor’s office’s chief concern with determining what has been damaged and what has been repaired by the end of 2024. “We don’t know yet what the impact that each individual property can be. We certainly don’t know the budget. We don’t know the millage rate. So what the tax implications are, are to be determined. It is safe to say that if the house is damaged and not repaired by the end of the year, then there will be a devaluation of that property.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
