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Pinellas' appraiser says little land slivers won't get parcel numbers and won't be fodder for land speculators.
By ROBERT FARLEY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 18, 2002
Pinellas County Property Appraiser Jim Smith says "insanely" poor judgment by his employees enabled land speculator Don Connolly to take advantage of numerous property owners.
In particular, Smith says he recently chewed out a handful of employees in the mapping department who assigned parcel numbers and values to small slivers of unusable land. Many of those properties quickly fell into tax arrears and created the opportunity for Connolly and others to buy them.
"It's senseless," Smith said Wednesday. "It's crazy."
The problems caused by Smith's office involved only sliver properties, and not standard-sized lots which Connolly generally bought. But Smith still vowed to fix the problem, instructing mappers to bring any new slivers to the attention of supervisors and not assign them tax numbers.
Connolly's purchases included a 3-foot strip between two lots in Palm Harbor, a 3.5-foot strip between two lots in St. Pete Beach and 2 feet between two attached villas in Palm Harbor.
When Connolly called Michael Stinson in March and offered to sell him a tiny, landlocked and mostly underwater property on the far end of a pond behind his Ozona home, Stinson laughed.
Connolly told Stinson he might put a dock there. Stinson scoffed and told him he'd get eaten alive by no-see-ums. With just 10 feet of uplands, the property is clearly unbuildable, Stinson said, so he doesn't worry what Connolly might do. But Connolly's purchase put a stigma on the neighborhood while Stinson was in the midst of trying to sell his home. And for that, Stinson said, the county has to accept some of the blame.
"I think the county should absorb these kinds of lots," he said.
Smith agrees. He said he, too, was shocked that his office created some of the lots Connolly purchased.
The county's meticulously precise computerized mapping system can find small pieces of property that hand-drawn maps never could, he said. Any number of things -- from small surveying errors to misrecording property widths -- can result in small gaps between two properties. Once spotted, the mappers assigned parcel numbers indiscriminately, Smith said.
Smith said one employee told him if they found a property, they had a responsibility to assign it a parcel number and a taxable value.
"Give me a break," Smith told him.
Employees need to use common sense, Smith said. Those slivers of land should have been brought to a supervisor, he said.
Smith said he has simply told his employees not to assign parcel numbers to slivers anymore, but rather to label them as "deed discrepancies."
"This will never happen again," Smith vowed. "I think we've got it nipped now."
Smith said the properties were not assigned taxable parcel numbers in an attempt to raise more tax revenue for the county.
"I don't give a good rat's tail what the taxes are," Smith said. "I'm not part of the revenue branch. I'm an anti-tax guy to begin with. I don't go looking for places to raise money."
Warren Weathers, Hillsborough County's deputy property appraiser, said that while he finds Smith's solution admirable, state law requires counties to assign parcel numbers to every piece of property they find.
Most of the small slivers of land are owned by municipalities or homeowners associations, and are therefore exempt from taxes. But when appraisers in the Hillsborough office come across small slivers of privately owned land, they often will assign it a value of $100. That's too small to even generate a tax bill, Weathers said, so there is no danger of it going to auction at a delinquent tax sale.
Charles D. Dye, Smith's director of cartography, said he recognized the problem long before the pink fence went up behind a home in Tarpon Woods and Connolly became a household name in the Tampa Bay area and beyond. In January, Dye began to identify a handful of property slivers and removed parcel numbers from them.
With surveying technology graduating from chains to global positioning systems, aerial photos and computers, the mapping is getting more and more precise, Dye said. All property appraisers' offices are now having to deal with the issue of how to handle small discrepancies between property lines, he said.
"People think buying and selling property is as clear-cut as going to Wal-Mart and buying a power tool," Dye said. "It's not clear-cut. It's kind of shades of gray."