Mrs. ACW and I got our housing assessment this weekend, and after reading about the ridiculosity surrounding other’s assessments, I was prepared for a mountainous raft of crap. Surprisingly, the value of my home did not go up by an umpity-hojillion percent, but instead increased at about the 33% rate detailed by the MD Dept. of Assessments and Taxation.
However, since we are talking about the guvmint, I’d be remiss to point out some of the things that they did get astronomically wrong.
The first thing they got wrong was deciding that we had a basement. Unless the MDDAT has been working tirelessly and silently digging out the crawlspace under our house and replacing gravel with complimented earth-tones and delightfully zany throw-pillows; or unless drainage-rocks and exposed beams with three feet of clearance between now counts as a basement, we do not have a basement. You’d think this would be easy to determine since we live in a duplex and share a roof, walls, and a foundation with our neighbors, and THEIR assessment (I looked it up online) properly indicates that they do not have a basement. However, I’m sure we can all agree that a simple double-check that would have been obvious to a fourth-grader is beyond the mental reasoning of a stadium full of bureaucrats. Hopefully, our magical basement will either appear at no cost to us, or be removed from the assessment soon.
The second thing that they got blitheringly, stupefyingly wrong, was the location of our house. Rather than placing our house on the tiny lot on which it belongs, we were placed about a block away, residing in the huge lot occupied by an apartment building. This stymies me for a number of reasons: first, they got our address right, and since we share the address with our neighbors (e.g. 123 Fake Street, Unit 1, and 123 Fake Street, Unit 2), and since they got our neighbor’s location correct, we should be located in the same lot; second, we share a roof, walls, and a foundation with our neighbors, SO HOW THE FUCK COULD OUR HOUSE POSSIBLY BE A BLOCK AWAY?
Jiminy fucking Christmas! You could fire pen-wielding monkeys scatter-shot out of cannons onto huge assessment forms and it appears they’d STILL get more right than the addle-pated drool-factories at the state.
