Property Tax Bills Will Drop for 26,435 : Real estate: The assessor says home values decreased the most in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley. Fillmore was the least affected.

The owners of more than 26,000 Ventura County homes will see their property tax bills drop by an average $220 this year due to slumping real estate values, the county assessor said Monday.

County Assessor Jerry Sanford said a survey of properties countywide found that 26,435 homes bought since the real estate slump began in mid-1988 decreased in assessed value by about $600 million.

The homes that dropped in value represent about 12% of all the taxable properties in Ventura County. The tax bills for the remaining properties will not be affected.

The lower tax bills are due out in October.

The lower assessments apply only to single-family houses and condominiums. Commercial and industrial properties have either maintained or increased in value.

While Sanford did not identify the location of each house that will decrease in value, he said the biggest drop in property values occurred in the cities of Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, where assessed values decreased a total of about $238 million.

Sanford said this is mainly because the two cities had the greatest percentage of tract homes built during the housing market slowdown.

The smallest drop in property values was in Fillmore, where housing construction in the past few years has been slow, Sanford said.

Despite the lower assessments, overall property values countywide will go up by 5.4%, due to increases allowed by Proposition 13, new construction and the resale of property that continued to increase in value, Sanford said.

Under Proposition 13, passed in 1978, the tax base is 1% of the assessed value of the house at the time of purchase. The assessed value can be increased no more than 2% annually, regardless of market value. The last time assessments were lowered on a wide scale in Ventura County was during the 1982 recession.

Representatives of the county and city governments and school districts had anticipated a 7% increase, which would have meant more tax revenues for those agencies.

The lower assessed value will mean that the public agencies will get a total of about $6 million less than they had anticipated for fiscal 1991-92, which began Monday.

For the county, that means that the general fund budget will receive about $1.8 million less than officials had projected, officials said.

Chief Administrator Richard Wittenberg called the decrease an “unpleasant surprise” and said it may play a significant role in deciding how much the budget will have to be cut next year.

The $400-million county budget faces a projected $16-million deficit next year, and Wittenberg has asked each department to prepare two budget-cutting plans: one that assumes a 5% cut and one with a 10% cut.

“It’s discouraging when you have a loss of almost $2 million,” he said. “But I can’t say whether it will mean a 5% cut or a 10% cut.”

Last year at this time, Sanford lowered the value on only 3,000 homes. However, because of the sluggish housing market and ongoing recession, he said, about seven times more properties qualified for a lower assessed value this year.

Because of the recession and market slowdown, he said home sales in the county are down by 32% from the same time last year.

According to the California Assn. of Realtors, the median price of a Ventura County home also fell from $247,660 in 1989 to $238,790 in 1990, a 3.6% decline.

Despite the savings the lower assessments will bring to homeowners, Sanford said many property owners will not be happy to learn that their property is worth less than they paid for it.

He said he has already received many phone calls from property owners who oppose the lower property values.

“I still get calls from people saying: ‘Why did you reduce the value of my house?’ ” Sanford said.

Meanwhile, public agencies that rely on property tax dollars got bad news from Assistant Treasurer-Tax Collector John McKinney, who said Monday that the number of property owners who are delinquent in paying property taxes is on the rise.

Last year, about 3.3% of the county’s property owners failed to pay their second property tax installment by June 30. While the exact figure has not yet been calculated for this year, McKinney believes that percentage will increase to 4.5%. “It’s a lot worse than we expected,” he said.

He said he believes that the growing number of delinquencies is a sign that the recession is not over. “I can’t think of any other reason,” he said. “There have been a lot of layoffs in the county.”

FYI

The owners of properties that have been assessed at a lower value will be notified by mail by the county assessor’s office. The notice will be sent out on Monday. The new property tax rates apply to fiscal year 1991-92, which began Monday. Tax payments are due in December, 1991 and April, 1992.