Now that the abolition of the Owego Police Department is off the table in the village, the next logical question is: what now? Village Trustee Tom Clark’s attempt to eliminate the police department was not a grudge, or done out of a sense of pride or some other character flaw. It was Clark’s reasoned judgment that, given the state and projected trends of village finances, disbanding the police was the best coarse of action. The failure of his proposal raises more questions than the idea’s eventual fate.

During discussions on Clark’s proposal, Trustee Ann Lockwood said she would like to see new tax assessment data before a final decision was made. That assessment is underway, according to Andrea Klett, Assessor for the Town of Owego, including the village. All residents with a change to their assessment will get a letter during the first week of May with the new assessed value of their buildings and property, Klett said. While the letters are still a few months off, some preliminary data has been compiled by the earnest town assessor.

The assessment which is underway is not a general assessment, according to Klett, but must be initiated by property owners contacting her and asking for their property to be revalued. Klett said that she is still receiving the requests from property taxpayers, some after being surprised with a tax bill for a property which is still unusable after the flood. If the property was undamaged or has been repaired ‘back to normal,’ Klett said that there would be no change to the assessment, unless there was significant damage to the neighborhood.

Preliminary numbers are not encouraging. Taxable value in the Village of Owego will be going down by at least $2,937,900. Town of Owego’s taxable properties will be going down by $4,817,300. The total loss calculated by Klett for the town and village totals $7,755,200 so far, which she hopes will go down with further recovery efforts, but could very well go up also. The assessment is still very much a work in progress, Klett stressed.

Other factors Klett said will play into the final assessment numbers for flood damaged areas will be the previously mentioned damage to a neighborhood; newly vacant properties from houses being razed; and the impact of sales of flood damaged houses at a fraction of their pre-flood assessed value. In the case of market-value sales adjustment, Klett said that the state monitors sales yearly from July 1 to June 30 of the following year. The impact from flood damaged property sales will not be seen until a couple years down the line, Klett said, and will be initiated by the state.

The result of the lowering of property values in Owego, Tioga Center, and Nichols where the flooding was at its worst in Tioga County will almost certainly mean that property taxes will go up elsewhere in the county. The entire county tax bill is divided between the nine towns in the county by property value of the individual town, and adjusted by the complex tax equalization process, to come to the final bill for each town. That may be split further into village and town shares where appropriate, and finally the individual property owner is given the bill, with town and if appropriate village taxes added on to the county’s levy. When the property values go down in a single town, the burden of taxes for the county is thus shifted to the rest of the towns.

The biggest hit to taxes for a town or village would mostly come from buy-outs, where a flood damaged property is sold to the municipality. According to Owego Town Clerk Mike Zimmer there are 35 homeowners who are requesting buy-outs in the town of Owego alone. A further 11 buy-outs are requested in Tioga Center, and another 16 in Nichols at the last report. Once these sales, if approved, go through, those properties are no longer on the tax rolls, which lowers the tax base. Empty properties also lower the property values for the neighborhood, for a two-edged sword of tax impact. Taxes must go up, or services must get cut, but wither way, difficult decisions await lawmakers at each level of government.

“The ramifications of this are going to be felt for a while,” Klett said of the Flood of 2011, “we aught to be prepared for another one.”