To the editor:

I write regarding the recent article entitled "Town takes new approach on assessments." The "new approach," which deserves to be called The Assessment Shuffle, is fundamentally flawed.

By state law, Rhode Island cities and towns are required to conduct complete revaluations of real property every 9 years, and to conduct updates at 3-year intervals between revaluations. Local tax assessors have no authority to deviate from that schedule. 

The drastic new rolling assessment scheme that has just surfaced purports to give Barrington's Tax Assessor the right to adjust valuations at any time. According to the article, the assessor based that wholesale revision of assessment practice on a Rhode Island Supreme Court ruling from May 2018 involving Portsmouth. That case has absolutely nothing to do with the scheme that Barrington has secretly adopted here. 

If the assessor finds support in that case, it must be contained in a portion of the court ruling that is written in invisible ink.

In the brief period since your publication of the article, I have been unable to find any other city or town that has interpreted the Portsmouth decision the way the Barrington Assessor has. If Barrington is going rogue with this new scheme, shouldn't that be a red flag to someone, anyone, in town hall? 

The town needs to step in immediately, to stop this runaway assessment train before suffering drastic financial consequences from it. Not long ago, the town publicly distorted (repeatedly) the history and meaning of the real estate tax exemption for seniors, and now the town is butchering even worse (if that is possible) the longstanding real estate tax assessment program. 

As if that were not enough, I have been unable to find anywhere on the town website the notice of public hearing, public posting and newspaper publication that are legally required to adopt a wholesale new assessment scheme such as this one.

If this fiasco were left to stand, the consequences would be profound. The tax assessor would be authorized to impose increased assessments without warning. If that happened, personal financial planning would become a relic of the past. And the town would be in a new land of continuous, year-long appeal hearings on these shotgun assessments. Who in their right mind would buy property in town and take the unknown risk of the assessor bringing down his assessment (and tax increase) hammer at any time, without any regulations constraining the exercise of that power (such as frequency, amount, factual basis, selectivity, etc.)? After all, he apparently has already unilaterally imposed 450 such illegal reassessments in the past year (which were based on the fundamental fallacy that a single sale price or the face amount of a building permit establishes fair market value). 

One can only wonder: has the assessor used his new-found roving reassessment authority to reduce the value of every parcel that sold below assessment, or have they all been 1-way cash cow increases?

These comments only skim the surface of what is wrong with this picture. For those residents who are contemplating selling and leaving town because of the burden of this secret program, you might want to cancel the moving van, because this scheme cannot survive a challenge. In fact, your only decision will be how to spend the money that the town will be required to refund to you because of your overpayment.

Matt Medeiros

Barrington