Cole County Presiding Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce ruled correctly in January 2017, a three judge panel of the Missouri appeals court in Kansas City ruled Tuesday, when she blocked the State Tax Commission from hearing an appeal from St. Louis County property tax payers.
State law clearly says property tax payers have a right to appeal rulings by a county's Board of Equalization to the commission, the judges found, but added state law prohibits the St. Louis County equalization board from changing an assessment in an even-numbered year - if that assessment was the same as the previous year and there were no property improvements or new construction in the previous year.
The case began with owners of 95 residential properties in St. Louis County, when they appealed their 2013 property assessments to the county's Equalization Board.
"The assessed values of six properties were settled between their owners and" St. Louis County Assessor Jake Zimmerman "before the County Board issued a decision in 2013," Judge Cynthia L Martin wrote for the appeals court panel. "The County Board issued decisions regarding assessed values for taxpayers' remaining 89 properties.
"Taxpayers did not appeal the County Board's 2013 decisions to the Commission."
But the same group of property owners appealed their 2014 assessments, even though those were "the same as had been determined by the 2013 settlements and/or County Board decisions," Martin wrote.
The property owners appealed to the State Tax Commission after the St. Louis County Equalization Board scheduled a hearing for each of the taxpayers' properties, then dismissed their 2014 appeals without conducting hearings.
Zimmerman asked the St. Louis County Circuit Court to block the commission from hearing the appeals, and the case later was transferred to Cole County in February 2015.
In an 11-page ruling Jan. 5, 2017, Joyce said the commission was "prohibited from exercising jurisdiction" over the taxpayers' appeals.
They appealed to the Kansas City court.
"The central issue in this case is whether the trial court abused its discretion in prohibiting the commission from exercising authority over taxpayers' appeals," Martin wrote.
And the keys to the appeals court's ruling, Martin wrote, was the property owners' lack of an appeal of their 2013 assessments as determined by the Equalization Board, and a section of the law specifically pointing to St. Louis County: "In any county of the first classification with a population of at least nine hundred thousand inhabitants, when there is an order of the board of equalization or the state tax commission, including a settlement order, relating to the assessment of property, the assessment shall remain the same for the subsequent even-numbered year unless there has been new construction or property improvements between January first of the odd-numbered year and January first of the following even-numbered year."
No other county in the state fits that population restriction.
The court ruled nothing in state law that limits the taxpayers' right to appeal.
But, because the taxpayers live in St. Louis County, the appeals court found another section of the state law "unambiguously provides that the County Board had no authority" to modify the 2014 assessments "unless there ha[d] been new construction or property improvements" in 2013."
That means the County Board "had no authority to afford taxpayers any relief in the form of modified assessments," the court ruled, unless the taxpayers showed there had been new construction or property improvements in 2013.