Urban Planning - GIS for Local Government: Participation Assignment

Part I - Research Local Property Appraisal Services

Q1:  Suwannee County Florida has a Property appraiser site at:  http://www.suwanneepa.com/

Q2: Due to the recent flooding and the limitations of a smaller staff, they most recent historical data seems to be March 2012 (For the month of February) rather than June.    The highest selling point of a property was $ 756,000.    The previous sales price was for $1,000,000 in 2005

Q3: The assessed land value is $201,480   You can click on the Tax estimator to see that the taxes are all paid up (and pretty reasonable)

Q4: It is interesting to see the decline in price since 2005.   I also don’t understand enough about how the Taxable values work.   Even though the property still sold for over 3 quarters of a million dollars, the “Land Value” s only at $201,480 and the “Taxable” value is at $24,039.

Part II - Mapping Assessment Values

Here is my map for this participation assignment:

Question 1:

The beauty of this method of showing parcels is that you can see several parcels that stand out from the rest.    If I had this data in front of me, my first wuestion would be about the blue and green parcels.   You mentioned in the assignment that these are lands that are not available for development.    After ruling those out, by next question would be on :

• Yellow Parcel: Ref No 071S312000001001  - Whis is the land value only $24,700 ?
• Red Parcel: Ref No 071S312000013001 – Why is ths land value $33,250 ?
• Shouldn’t they match the majority of the other parcels which value at $27,075 ?
• After I answered the question on these, I would look at all the parcels that were light orange (5 of them).  Why is their value $24,983 vs the $27,075 of the majority of the neighborhood.

There may be a very good answer for these questions, but the point of the exercise is to show how it makes the review process much easier.