Parking lot owners in downtown Buffalo are seething over the recent round of city property revaluations, which increased the average assessment on for-profit parking lots by more than 700 percent.
"When I got my tax bill, I thought it was a typo. I kept counting the digits," said Jean Elsinghorst, whose assessment climbed by a whopping 8,160 percent, from $2,500 to $204,000.

At the current nonhomestead tax rate of $37.41 per $1,000 of assessed value, Elsinghorst's 2006 city property tax bill will soar from $93.52 a year to $7,631.64.

"After a sleepless night, I called an attorney and said, "Either I've got an incorrect tax bill, or you have a job,' " she said. "Yes, indeed, I am protesting this. It just doesn't make sense."

Elsinghorst is among scores of parking lot owners who have appealed their assessments, questioning how the city arrived at the drastically higher values.

Businessman James T. Sandoro, who owns a dozen surface lots in the Seneca-Swan Street neighborhood, said he was "stunned" when he opened his revaluation notice. The increase in Sandoro's assessments would make his property tax bill nearly 15 times higher - skyrocketing from $9,064 to $132,678.

"The new tax amount is far more than we take in," Sandoro said. "The assessment in no way reflects the reality of those lots."

Sandoro, who runs the nonprofit Buffalo Transportation/Pierce-Arrow Museum at 263 Michigan Ave., has a multiyear contract with Erie Community College for student parking for most of the slots. He currently uses the lots for museum events as needed, but his long-term plan is to turn the lots over to the museum as it expands to include the Frank Lloyd Wright filling station.

"If this assessment situation can't be changed, we'll donate the properties to the museum and take them off the tax rolls sooner than later," Sandoro said. "I have no problem paying a fair tax rate, but this isn't fair."

Bruna Michaux, city assessment and taxation commissioner, strongly defends the updated assessments, saying they were based on a significant amount of legwork by her staff, including a physical inspection of all 117 downtown for-profit parking lots.

"We are committed to annual reassessment in Buffalo and have a responsibility to correct all valuation inequities," Michaux said. "The downtown parking lots were part of the 2005 revaluation program. Our job isn't popular, but we have to do what's right."

The commissioner said field visits by assessment staff members yielded such information as parking fees and number of vehicles parked in the lots. The city did not take into account lot turnover and based its valuations on an eight-hour/five-day usage, eliminating night, weekend and holiday use.

"If anything, our numbers are conservative," Michaux said. "Many of these lots turn over several times a day and operate outside the workday."

As with updates of residential and commercial buildings, the city also factored in recent parking lot sale prices in its recalculation of lot values. One of the transactions used as a barometer of lot values was M&T Bank's sale of a parking lot at 470 Pearl St. to developers who plan to construct a multimillion-dollar, mixed-use building.

Some parking lot owners have complained that $1.2 million sale provides an inflated measure of surface lot values, as the buyers paid an inflated price based on their long-term plans for construction, not its worth as a parking lot.

Michaux noted that her office sent questionnaires to every lot owner ahead of the physical inspections, requesting detailed information on use and revenues.

"We were virtually ignored," she said. "Fewer than 20 bothered to fill them out and return them, so we did what we could with the information we were able to gather ourselves. If they feel we're wrong, they can come in and appeal."

Common Council Member Brian C. Davis of the Ellicott District, who has fielded several complaints from parking lot owners, has filed a resolution calling for a full review of the lot revaluations. The Council's Finance Committee has yet to consider it.

Bert W. Simon, owner of Simon Electric Co., owns several downtown parcels that he has cobbled into surface lots, primarily used by his own employees and his tenants. If his assessments stick, he said, they will drive him out of the parking business.

"I charge $3 a day right now, with a discounted monthly fee," he said. "I'd have to go to $15 a day to keep pace with my assessment increase, and at that rate, my lots would be empty. This isn't downtown Toronto or New York City."

If Simon is unsuccessful in his challenge, his tax bill would climb from $5,585 to $31,782.

"I guess I could tear up the pavement, put a fence around the lots and let them sit as little lawns," he said. "That would be extreme, but it would force them to lower the rate."

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