Day: August 23, 2014

Yesterday I ran For those that think Team Fed’s performance in the DMR Scandal was abysmal linking a post I did back in April 2013 about Sean Anthony’s tax assessment on a house on the Bay in Pass Christian. Yesterday evening I was contacted by Harrison County Board of Supervisors Attorney Tim Holleman, who wished to set the record straight regarding the role of Tax Collector LaRosa had in the sequence of events:

The truth is the tax receipt posted on your website is for 2012. The date for determining when improvements are to be added to property assessment is January 1 of each year. Improvements are not added until a Certificate of Occupancy is issued. I am advised that a certificate of occupancy was issued on the Anthony home on January 9, 2012, therefore the home could not added to the tax rolls until January 1, 2013. It was added in 2013 and should not have been on the rolls for 2012 as was alleged in your blog.

The county gets a printout of COs/permits from Cities/code offices each year, from that newly constructed homes are picked up and added to tax rolls.  So if Anthony CO not issued until 1/9/12 it would not be picked up till 2013 tax roll.  It’s up to Cities whether someone moves in before a CO is issued as county has no knowledge of such and no way of knowing if someone did so.  There are over 100,000 parcels in Har Co. impossible to ck everyone each year, county relies on Cities to give info within Cities on new construction primarily COs and permits.

To the extent the Tax Collector is dependant on the Certificate of Occupancy which in this case is Municipal building department function, the insinuation in my original post that Tax Collector Larosa was involved in the inside of a bad tax assessment was incorrect and Slabbed New Media apologizes for making it.

That said and to the extent my sourcing on the issue of the date of occupancy of the Anthony homestead is rock solid, Slabbed stands by the larger point made in the original post regarding problems with how the newly constructed home was valued for the 2012 property tax rolls.