Ron's property tax assessment appeal and a bad website

Contents

This week was quite unusual because I visited Ron on a couple of extra occasions. On Wednesday I accompanied him to Lance’s Floor and Tile’s Pembina store to get a copy of their HyperAccess 5 setup and the scripts they use for transferring data.

Checking house sales in the Earl Selkirk neighbourhood

That done, we returned to his place to determine if it would be worth the effort involved in filing an appeal of his tax assessment notice. We got a copy of the “Sales Book” from the City of Winnipeg web site that lists all the property sales for the previous couple of years. The information came in a PDF file, but when the tables for Ron’s area were copied to the clipboard and then pasted into a text editor, the columns disappeared and we were left with individual lines of text with each word separated simply by spaces.

Since I hadn’t brought my laptop with me I didn’t have ready access to a Linux system that I could use to run pdftotext and get better output. (Actually I did—I could have used PuTTY on Ron’s Windows computer to connect to penguin at home and then, if needed, to my laptop.) It took me about 45 minutes to write a simple awk program to parse the data and find the selling price of all two storey houses in the Earl Selkirk neighbourhood. This information I wrote to a .CSV file which we opened using a spreadsheet program. The end result of the exercise was we determined the assessed value of Ron’s property was considerably above the average selling price for similar one in the area, even when we accounted for the fact Ron’s house is much newer.

We decided he should file an appeal; if he managed to get a 10% reduction in the assessed value (and likely a 10% redunction in the property taxes) he would see an immediate saving of over $300 in property taxes—well worth the $55.00 filing fee for a property assessment appeal.

Winnipeg Assessment and Taxation web site

That’s where we ran into a problem. The City of Winnipeg Assessment and Taxation web site, www.winnipegassessment.com, has the following to say about appealing an assessment:

• File an appeal along with payment of the appropriate fee at:
    Appeals Manager
    Board of Revision
    510 Main Street
    Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1B9
    Telephone: 311 or toll free 1-877-311-4974.
• If you have questions about an appeal, please call the Board of Revision at 311 or toll free 1-877-311-4974.

That page, however says nothing at all about the ability to file an appeal online.

It turns out it is possible to file an appeal online, but that information is buried in the web pages for the Board of Revision (did you notice the link in the second bullet point above?) Not only are thoese pages completely separate from the Assessment and Taxation site (it’s part of site for the City Clerk’s office,) the second bullet point above implies—to me at least—that it’s useful to follow the link only if you have questions about an appeal that’s already in progress. The bullet point does not say that by following the link you can get to a page that lets you file an appeal on-line.

Further, as soon as I read the text “if you have questions about an appeal” I basically ignored the remainder of the line because the only question I had (“how do you file an appeal?”) appeared to have been fully answered earlier in the page.

Board of Revision site

The Board of Revision page at the City Clerk’s office site is only a little more helpul. While the landing page clearly lays out the fact the Board of Revision exists to hear appeals regarding property assessments, it gives no information at all on how to file an appeal. Way down the right hand side of the page there is a link to a PDF document of the Application Form, but nowhere is there a mention of being able to file an appeal on-line.

On the left hand sidebar on the landing page, intermingled with other sections of the City Clerk’s site but clearly highlighted, are three options:

• Introduction (the page we’re viewing)
• Business Annual Rental Value
• Realty

Clicking on Realty opens a sub-menu with the following:

• Realty
  • Introduction
  • Application for Revision Filing Fee Information
  • FAQs

If one clicks on the Introduction link under the Realty link above, the resulting page includes the following paragraph:

It is important to note that the property owners may file an application for revision along with the appropriate non-refundable filing fee for any year within the time frame allowed for filing an application for revision as is legislated by the Provincial Municipal Assessment Act and as is advertised by the Board of Revision.

Following the link in the above paragraph finally gives you a page that reads, in part:

How to File an Application for Revision

• Print and Mail (links to a PDF document; gives the mailing address)
• Pick-up in Person (information on where to go at City Hall)
• File Online (actually gives a link to the online form)

More silliness: if one clicks on the FAQs there is the following question:

Q. Can I file my application online?
A. Yes. Online filing is permitted between June 3 at 8:30 AM and June 26 at 4:30 PM. Credit card payment is required.
If a property owner feels an application for review is warranted, online filing is encouraged.

Notice what’s missing? A link to the page where you can file your appeal online!

Filing the appeal

Unfortunately Ron had left the task of determining if he should file an appeal to the last day. Due to delays in writing the awk program and tracking down the on-line appeal page, it was just past 4:30 PM when we were finally able to submit the application. Despite being late, the page let us enter a credit card number to pay the filing fee, then failed to give us the appeal form itself because the time to file had passed.

When Ron followed up with the Board of Revision the next day they informed him the payment had gone through, and because of that let him complete the papaerwork needed to file the appeal.