Property Taxes and the Iowa Supreme Court

So I’m catching up on my Iowa Supreme Court cases, today. I just finished Soifer v. Floyd County Board of Review and, have to say, I respectfully disagree with the Court’s decision, and the precedent it followed.

It appears clear to me that the assessed value of a property should be based solely on the property’s inherent value. Sure, you can say this property is set up as a restaurant, so it should have a similar value to other reastaurant properties. In Soifer, though, the Court says that the assessed value of a McDonald’s restaurant is best determined by comparing it to the sales of other fast-food franchise restaurants sold as going concerns, meaning that someone is buying both the real estate and the business.

To me, when you value something based on that much specificity of its use, you begin to add some of the value of the business as a going concern to the value you are taxing. You no longer are taxing just the value of the property, but also the intangible value that a particular business brings to the site.

In my opinion, properties should be valued as if they were empty, without any business to speak of. A restaurant is a restaurant, but you can certainly place a value on the land and the structure without looking at the success of the business that occupies the space.

I think this may be an issue that the legislature should take up, as there is a string of cases that the Court relied on in Soifer, and it doesn’t appear that they are making any plans to right the ship.

Wow. It has been a while.

So I have not posted anything other than court schedules for quite some time. I guess I’ve had a lot going on. The most notable I suppose is the arrival of my son Max. He is now about a month old and I’m finally starting to settle back in to work.

I also joined Faceboook back in November. My sisters had been pushing me to do it and I thought it might be a good idea for a number of reasons. One of those reasons was advertising. I figured if I put my name and what I do out there for people in the area to see, it might draw in some business. It hasn’t worked, of course, but I think there is some real potential there and I may explore it more.

I also got to lose my first appeal. It was a termination of parental rights case and the opinion came out a couple of weeks ago. Not surprising, but I think the case, and many like it, raised a few issues. This was a case where the termination trial happened in May of 2008. In June, before an order had been entered, the flood occurred and wiped out the court file,  and both the judge’s and court reporter’s notes.

I tried a few things to get a new trial, but the didn’t work, of course. After I filed the appeal, I got an order from the Supremem Court requiring me to file a statement of evidence pursuant to the Rules of Civil Procedure. Now this begs the question, I think, what is a fair record on appeal? Do the parties get a fair appeal if the attorneys and everyone else involved has to try to recreate what happened during trial on paper? What happens to spontaneous objections and rulings from the bench during trial? I argued that point and lost.

I guess that’s the way it goes.