Things You Learn To Expect Especially From Your Tax Assessor

Wonderfully Taxing Letters Of Intent

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Most of you who read my work know I’m a Texas boy, born and raised. If you’re living here or have once lived here, then you know about the state property taxes in this beautiful state.

There ain’t none.

Now hold on a minute. I didn’t say Texas was tax-free. Far from it. I said, as far as state property taxes go, there’s no such thing. However, and it’s a big; however, the local municipalities such as counties, cities, and school districts can tax the h*ll right out of your butt.

And they do, oh, believe me, they do.

This is not a new concept (ask the money lenders and tax collectors Jesus drove out of the temple) and has been going on for centuries. I’m pretty confident each of you experiences your own tax woes, whether it’s from a home mortgage and taxes on your home or dear old Uncle Sh*thead, uh, the IRS.

We’re all pretty much in the same boat with this tax thingy I’m pretty sure. We’re all experiencing different variations of a mortgage lender of choice co-owning a home that they’ll let you and your family live in it as long as you continue to pay for the right to dwell in it.

Or apartment living where you don’t own anything but the furniture inside the box.

For the home dwellers out there and especially the homeowners, some of us choose to manage our own property taxes by setting back a little something, something each month. Others take the escrow account method of blending the monthly house note with increments of the charges we’ll need to pay come tax time on our luxurious thirty million dollar mansions.

What?

No, that wasn’t a mistake. My wife and I own a modest home, and by modest, I mean just barely over the 100K mark. I’m talking about a scoche, a smidgeon, a sprinkle, probably just a tad over.

But for some reason, each year over the last five years, our local tax assessor’s office has had a varying opinion about the worth of our home. Thus the thirty million dollar remark.

And it’s only going to get worse. I read an article this morning where a city in Texas (I’ll not mention which one okay San Antonio?) is considering increasing the property tax rate by almost eight percent. Yeap, you read that right, eight percent.

Why do you ask? Come on, ask. If you don’t ask, this fantastic piece of mine dies on the vine.

Thank you Jesus, and thank you dude on the back row. You look a little drunk, but that’s okay. Sit down. If you can’t remain upright, just lay down and go back to sleep. You’re job’s done.

Ahem.

So the reason Bexar county (remember — Texas the state doesn’t have personal property taxes) is upping the ante on taxes?

COVID-19

Yes, COVID-19 is causing havoc. Not only is it f*cking up the way we used to live our lives, not only is it killing our citizens and hitting our already strained-to-breaking pocketbooks, but now it’s screwing up certain tax revenues.

And instead of putting a freeze on homeowner property tax increases, Texas reptilian, uh sorry Freudian slip, republican governor GregAdouchebag, says no way no how. Hey, the money’s got to come from somewhere, right? With all the businesses going out of business, who’s going to shore up the deficit?

I can just hear old GregAdouchebag saying it now.

“D*amn it, I told them all to go back to work. If they’d listened to me we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Really douchebag? Probably not, we’d all be dead if we’d listened to you.

So, no tax hike freeze and old Greggy Poo and his minions need money to pay their salaries. Where is it coming from? The pockets of middle and lower-income America that’s where via higher property taxes.

Good God Almighty, what the f*ck else?

Rant partially over. There’s more.

Recently, I received my Hey-We’re-Going-To-Stick-It-To-You letter from my local tax assessor’s office. And as expected, it was a copy from last year’s playbook.

“The local tax assessors office has performed a diligent assessment of your home and property. Below is the assessed value which will be used to determine city, county and school district taxes incurred for the year 2020. As always, if you should feel this assessment is in error please call 1–800-EatSh*tAndDie to set up an appointment to discuss.”

Now, except for the 1–800-EatSh*tAndDie part, which I obviously made up, I believe I have related the letter from the tax assessor’s office accurately.

What I didn’t do was detail what they really meant to say. Here’s what my local tax assessor’s office would have written if they were into speaking the truth, which they’re not.

“Dear dollar sign,

The local tax assessor’s office has performed a diligent assessment of your home and property. By diligent, we mean we hired the son of Bob Thomas who works in road maintenance as soon as Bob’s boy got released from prison for that Ponzi scheme he was convicted of running.

Now don’t fret, we have thoroughly trained #548927, uh Bob Thomas’ boy how to perform a rigorous assessment. Yes, we’ve taught him how to manage driving around the darkened neighborhoods at three in the morning armed with a penlight and a cell phone. He’s a bright, eager convict, uh worker and very diligent in making sure he zips past the houses doing fifty-five in a thirty as he shines his penlight on your home and records his assessment of its true value.

We believe the young man shows amazing potential for estimating the true value of homes. He joins our team after doing five to ten years of “inside” training and we feel confident he understands the true value of anything larger than an eight by ten containment area, uh, cell, uh room.

So we can with certainty state, and with gratitude to Tom’s son who cased your house last night again, even though we didn’t ask him to (what an overachiever the boy is) we are valuing your house at almost double the value over last year, well because we can.

If you should disagree with the veracity of this assessment you are welcome to contact someone at the assessor’s office who will be glad to tell you not to come in because we don’t want you to make us sick.

Just drop the assessment you paid good money for so you can counter our perfectly fine and accurate by the way, assessment, in our mail slot. Where it will fall on top of the piles of assessments other idiots like you paid money for expecting us to change our valuations.

Uh, that would require us to actually look at all those assessments which you should know is just not going to happen.

Looks like we done stuck it to your a*ss again this year Bucko. Sad huh?

The Tax People

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