Sun Gazette editorial: Home assessments will kick off Arlington budget season

In just a few weeks, Arlington property owners will find in their mailboxes updated-for-2023 residential or commercial property assessments. It’s going to be curious to see what they show.

Despite the freefall in home sales over the past six months (which anyone who was paying attention easily could have foretold), home values have largely held up, owing to a limited supply of homes locally.

Yes, the days of “put it on the market it the morning and have multiple no-questions-asked bids above listing price by the afternoon” are long gone, but we’d anticipate that many homeowners will find their 2023 assessment is actually higher than 2022, based on the increases that occurred during the first three months of the year gone by.

That will cause some challenges for County Board members, who under state law must tax residential property at the same rate as commercial property, even though the latter segment of the market continues to see big declines.

We opined last week that we expect homeowners to bear the brunt of the county government’s ravenous spending habits in the coming year. Time will tell.

But the budget process really doesn’t get rolling until those assessments are released and we all can see what the situation is. And that is getting closer, day by day.

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