Editor:

I want to thank Mayor Dan Heckler and Kendall County Attorney Don Allee for expressing sincere interest in the matter of huge disparities in the assessed valuations for property held by developers vs. property held by individual homeowners. In particular, I thank the mayor for taking the initiative to meet with Senator Jeff Wentworth to discuss the matter.

There have been literally hundreds of lots owned by developers assessed at a fraction of the true market value. The Legislature (Texas Property Code Sec. 23.12. Inventory) allows the Chief Appraiser to value the property less because it is "inventory" held for sale.

The method of valuing "inventory" is left up to the chief appraiser, therefore it varies from one appraisal district to another. Kendall County Chief Appraiser Gary Eldridge uses a formula of 30 to 40 percent of market value.

According to the mayor's meeting with Senator Wentworth, the mayor advised me in an e-mail that the senator “intends to recommend that the code be changed so that the chief appraiser will not have the latitude to adjust appraised value based on inventory.”

On further scrutiny of this matter, the following are numbers from the Kendall Appraisal District concerning the Esperanza/Marlin Atlantis property.

Most of the properties owned by Esperanza/Marlin Atlantis have an ag exemption. Since these properties are clearly intended for development, how can they be eligible for an ag exemption?

More importantly however, Marlin Atlantis' total assessed valuations went down this year by over 30 percent. In 2008, the total assessed value for the Esperanza/Marlin Atlantis properties was $7,876,630; in 2007, the total assessed value was $11,320,720: a decrease in value of $3,444,090 (30.43 percent); and while the county's total assessed valuations went up by 13 percent.

Based on these numbers, Marlin Atlantis will be paying approximately $70,000 less in taxes this year than they did last year (2 percent of $3,444,090).

Call or e-mail Senator Jeff Wentworth and your local elected officials (city, county, and BISD) and encourage them to pursue this matter during the upcoming legislative session. These are tax revenues lost to the city, county, and BISD; and in the long run come out of your pocket.

Karen M. Wetzel

Boerne

Editor:

I appreciate the coverage your paper has provided on Dan Ochoa’s public information requests saga that has been playing out here in Boerne.

If we strip the question back to a basic premise, it becomes “how should we spend taxpayer dollars and what role should government play in advancing the cause of private commercial concerns?”

This is a debate that is certainly playing out on the national level with the federal bail-out of Wall Street. The debate in Boerne is no different.

My own opinion is that government has a duty to act “for the public good”, to provide an unbiased and level playing field in which commercial concerns can operate, to provide sufficient regulatory supervision of commercial concerns who might otherwise act to defraud, deceive or engage in uncompetitive business practices and these actions need to be accomplished with as much openness, transparency and citizen involvement as possible.

Instead of that “public good”, “level playing field” and “open government”, here in Boerne we’ve had the following occur: Kendall County Economic Development Corp. is partially funded with tax dollars with the intent of encouraging the growth of commercial properties to our tax base.

Instead, EDC promotes Esperanza, a largely residential development, by funding a study, done by TXP, titled “The Potential Economic & Regional Impact of the Esperanza Master-Planned Community”.

Since this was, in part, paid for with tax dollars, one would expect an unbiased consideration of the impact, that would include not only benefits that may come to the community, but an analysis of the costs and negative repercussions that may also result from this development.

Instead, we got a glossy piece of marketing that was presented to the public under the guise of being a quasi-governmentally sponsored full analysis.

By TXP staff’s own admission, they were not tasked with an analysis of costs to the community – they were contracted by EDC to analyze only the monies that would come to the community.

When I spoke with CEO/President Dan Rogers about this lack, he commented that their budget was “limited,” thus explaining the one-sided report. That’s sort of like doing only the “assets” column on a balance sheet, while omitting the “liabilities”.

That ensures a positive balance, that was, in this case, highly deceptive. And tax dollars funded this deception, to the detriment of both taxpayers and other businesses competing with Marlin Atlantis.

The playing field is seeing some decided tilting off level. Ochoa is right to question continued taxpayer support of KC EDC, if this is how tax dollars are being used.

Theresa M. Fraser

Boerne