As announced in the spring, the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance will handle the next round of assessment adjustments in Porter County to help get the county’s delayed tax bills on track for 2010.

The DLGF will hold the required public hearing on its decision to conduct the county’s trending this Monday at 6:30 p.m. in the Harre Student Union Ballroom at Valparaiso University.

A legal notice announcing the meeting notes that the DLGF must perform the trending work for a county that does not make the annual adjustments as required by law.

Trending is the annual adjustments to property values based on actual sales. The DLGF announced that it would handle the trending for the taxes that will be payable in 2010 earlier this year, when it issued a report on Porter County’s most recent assessments.

That report was prompted by outcry among business owners over their new assessments. For the most part, the DLGF upheld the new commercial values, but ordered the assessor’s office to adjust the data for certain residential properties.

The assessor’s office submitted the new ratio study by the June 1 deadline, and the DLGF approved the figures in mid July for the taxes that will be payable this year.

Because the county was already delayed in this year’s tax bill work, the DLGF announced that it would conduct trending later this year in order to get the county’s tax billing back on track for 2010.

The DLGF is also handling the trending for neighboring LaPorte County, which is further behind Porter County in its tax bill work.

Posted 8/14/2009