An error by the county tax assessor's office didn't just affect the Board of Education's bottom line.

Chief Appraiser Gary Udinsky said his staff used the wrong version of a computer program to calculate the value of property on which certain homeowners pay school taxes.

The result: The school board, which just passed its budget on Monday, will get about $25,000 less in tax revenue than it expected.

And about 25,000 Chatham County homeowners will get faulty notices of assessment in the mail sometime this week, if they haven't already received them.

Only the assessments sent to homeowners with a Stephens-Day homestead exemption are affected. There are different versions of the exemption, and that's where things get complicated.

So listen carefully.

Here's what happened and who is affected:

The county version of the exemption effectively freezes the value of a home at a base year value ­ the year before you signed up for the exemption. The "freeze" is lifted only if major improvements are made or the house is sold.

If your base year value is $100,000, and the value of your home goes up to $140,000, you get an exemption for that $40,000 difference.

End result: you only pay county taxes on $100,000.

The school district's version of the exemption is slightly different.

You still only are taxed on the base year value, but that base year value is adjusted yearly according to the Consumer Price Index.

So the base value on which you are taxed for school purposes does go up every year.

It was in calculating the value of that base year ­ the number in Box No. 7 on your assessment notice ­ that the Tax Assessor's Office went wrong.

Some base year values were slightly too high, while others were slightly too low, Udinsky said.

The base year value for county taxation purposes ­ Box No. 6 ­ was calculated correctly, Udinsky said.

Udinsky said his office would be sending letters to all homeowners with faulty information on their assessment notices, explaining what had happened.

The problem has been fixed, he said, and when county tax bills come out in September, homeowners will be taxed based on the corrected base year value.

Savannah Morning News

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2002