Check this out. WSOC-TV relates that Romero’s — or La Ramero, listings have it both ways — was robbed Sunday. Actually the owner was followed home by three robbers and robbed at gunpoint in her driveway near Ballantyne. Oddly the victims could not supply a description of their attackers.
Still, news all around. Another violent robbery. So I pull up the property records of the parcel — 6301 South Blvd. — and find more concrete evidence of the property tax explosion in Mecklenburg County.
Romero’s occupies a 11,480 square foot slab built in 1966. It was renovated in 2004. The 1991 valuation was $334,221; 1998 was $391,200, and 2003 $491,500. So about a 25 percent increase from 1998 to 2003. Then the renovation, which kicked the value to $595,000 in 2004, which was then reduced to $530,300 in 2005.
OK, then. The question before the county’s assessors in 2010 was, how much more than $530,300 is the structure worth? The renovation is now six years old, the last assessment just five years prior.
Would you believe $408,500? Or that the structure’s value increased $81,700 per year to come to a grand total of $938,800? That third-tier retail space on South Blvd. — and that is being generous — is worth about $82 a square foot? The average retail rent in the Charlotte area is about $19 a square foot. Not surprisingly, the owners of the parcel filed an appeal of the new valuation in May.
But they are doomed. Across the street, a retail complex of 31,000 square feet supposedly zoomed in value by 53 percent — to $3.5m.
Understand what is going on here. County gnomes are simply assuming that — in part because these businesses are close-by the $550m. light rail line other local government gnomes had built — these parcels should be generating a monthly income of X. Why? Because all the bright, pointy-headed little local gnomes assumed — just knew — that their investment in light rail would pay off with higher tax revenues. And how do you get more property tax revenue? With higher valuations. And how do you get that?
By gnomely decree.