Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

11 acres, 4 years, but no tax bill

An appraiser's error left a parcel off the rolls, which will cost the county $13,000.

By THERESA BLACKWELL, Times Staff Writer
Published August 18, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT

A mistake by Pinellas County Property Appraiser Jim Smith's office allowed the owner of the East Lake Woodlands Country Club to avoid paying taxes on 11 nearby acres for four years.

Smith's office failed to notice that the land, once designated a school site, had passed into private ownership.

As a result, ClubCorp Golf of Florida LLC received a total exemption from property taxes on the parcel from 2003 to 2006.

About $54,000 in taxes went unbilled. Officials plan to bill ClubCorp for the last three years of taxes, a total of about $41,000. But taxpayers will lose the $13,000 in taxes from 2003 because state law gives the property appraiser only three years to correct erroneous assessments.

Officials in Smith's office discovered the oversights when the St. Petersburg Times questioned the property's total tax exemption for those years.

Computer programs used to check for such errors would never have found the problem because they didn't flag School Board exemptions on privately held land.

"Of course this is embarrassing," said Erin Moore, the deputy for assessment administration in the Property Appraiser's Office. "But it's fixable."

Smith declined comment on the matter, saying that he wouldn't discuss his office's operation while he was under investigation by a state grand jury.

"I'm just not talking to the St. Pete Times right now," he said. "I'd prefer you talk to staff."

The grand jury took testimony this month from Smith, Pinellas County commissioners and other officials after the Times reported that the commission voted to buy a 1.5-acre piece of vacant land that Smith owned in East Lake for $225,000 -- nearly four times the assessed value his office assigned to it. The grand jury is scheduled to resume its work next week.

As a result of the Times inquiry about the East Lake Woodlands property, the Property Appraiser's Office changed computer-generated reports that it relies on for reviewing exemptions to prevent this from happening again.

"We wanted to know how this happened as much as you did," said Moore. "So now we know and we've taken care of it."

* * *

The problem has its roots in the mid 1970s, when developers created East Lake Woodlands, which includes about 3,700 homes and 36 holes of golf just southeast of Lake Tarpon.

The original developer set aside the 11 acres near East Lake Road so the Pinellas County School Board could put a school there.

The School Board didn't own the land, which was covered with woods and wetlands, but because the property was earmarked as a school site, it was exempt from property taxes while under the development agreement, just as any school would be.

But with the wetlands, the site didn't have the 10 to 12 acres of buildable land needed even for an elementary school, said Jim Miller, director of the School Board's real property office.

In 2002, when the agreement expired and no school had been built, the land reverted back to the owner of East Lake Woodlands. By that time, a privately held company, ClubCorp Golf of Florida LLC, had bought the property as part of a larger deal.

ClubCorp's parent company is based in Dallas and owns more than 70 country clubs nationwide, including the Countryside and East Lake Woodlands country clubs.

In late 2002, when the School Board filed a quit-claim deed giving up its right to use the property, Smith's office changed its records to reflect ClubCorp's ownership of the land, but didn't remove the School Board's tax exemption. It's the kind of error that can happen a few times a year, said officials inside Smith's office and in the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser's Office.

"Clerical errors can happen any time," said Jim Glaros, the assistant chief deputy of valuation for the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser's Office. "These things typically come up when the deed is not received."

Smith's staff catches a few mistakes each year, but this one surprised Erin Moore, the deputy for assessment administration. Her staff checks exemptions with several computer reports that list property exemptions worth close scrutiny.

But officials discovered that those reports did not check for School Board exemptions or government exemptions on privately owned property.

Now the software that creates those reports checks for both, said Jeff Byrkit, the office's deputy for information systems.

When the office ran a new batch of reports last week, they turned up no additional unwarranted exemptions.

Moore said she planned to send a letter to ClubCorp Golf of Florida LLC with notices of the proposed property taxes for 2004, 2005 and 2006 on the 11 acres. The company could appeal the assessments, but a ClubCorp representative declined to comment on the matter until it received the letter.

The Property Appraiser's office gave the property a just market value of $689,000 for 2006.

In late 2006, ClubCorp sold the property for $250,000 to another company, Maaser ELW I LLP. The company's managing partner is East Lake Woodlands resident and North Pinellas developer Scott Spoerl.

When the new deed went through in November, the Property Appraiser's Office lifted the School Board exemption. So a bill for 2007 taxes was already in the works for the new owner.

In the meantime, Maaser ELW I LLP has divided the 11 acres into a subdivision called the Cove. Its four home sites are for sale for $650,000 to $750,000 each.

Theresa Blackwell can be reached at tblackwell@sptimes.com or (727) 445-4170.

[Last modified August 18, 2007, 00:41:53]