jtharpjtharp
commented
4 years ago Wild discrepancies between these Taxable-Building-Square-Footage figures and the classic Building-Area-per-County-Records figures. I've made a couple of Tableau visualizations. (https://public.tableau.com/profile/j.t.h.a.r.p)
API Docs: https://dev.socrata.com/foundry/data.cityofberkeley.info/9a47-nj4i Definition of City of Berkeley Taxable Square Footage is defined in each of several distinct and potentially contradictory "parcel tax" statutes in the Berkeley Municipal Code. Beginning with implementation of the Library Relief Act of 1980 (BMC 7.56), City staff and leadership have sown confusion by referring to Taxable Square Footage as "Building Square Footage", a term which has a different and widely understood meaning in the zoning, building, and property industries. Berkeley's "Taxable Building Square Footage" figures are consistently much higher than Building Square Footage, owing to inclusion of non-conforming and uninhabitable basement, crawlspace, porch, etc. (https://www.codepublishing.com/CA/Berkeley/)
Taxable Square Footage figures maintained at City Dept. of Finance are rife with errors, some due to inaccuracies in initial records captured from drawings circa 1960, some due to failure to capture details of modifications tracked by permits, some due to non-permitted modifications. Formal tax exemptions for square footage in "off-street parking" may remain after garage conversions to living quarters. Informal exemptions such as a 50% discount for non-enclosed porches and less-than-6-foot basements, have been applied without any consistency. These errors and inconsistencies result in inequitable distribution of the local tax burden. These errors have been articulated in a series of reports from the City Auditor, since 1994, when the focus was primarily on lost revenue. (https://www.cityofberkeley.info/Auditor/Home/Audit_Reports.aspx)
Annual tax bills sent to property owners via Alameda County Tax Assessor do not include a disclosure of parcel Taxable Square Footage. In tax year 2019-2020,the 7 (seven) City taxes and 2 (two) School District taxes based on Taxable Square Footage amount to more than $1.00 per square foot -- thousands of dollars per parcel. In March 2020, voters passed 2 additional such School District taxes, amounting to additional 21.4 cents per square foot. (http://gis.acgov.org/Html5Viewer/index.html?viewer=parcel_viewer)
Insight into these issues of inequity, lack of transparency, and lack of accountability has been championed by Berkeley for Assessment Tax Equity since late 2019. (https://berkeleytaxes.info/calculate-your-square-footage-tax/)
Hundreds of individual property owners, real estate professionals, and members of the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council have now contacted City staff and leaders for explanation and redress. By March 2020, the most noticeable City response has been data removal: prior to the increased scrutiny and comment, the City's GIS parcel data viewer had included a square footage figure "BLDG SQFT AS PER COUNTY". Again, the City's efforts are focused on obscuring for the widest possible audience the fact that the City's peculiar Taxable Square Footage is a higher figure, is a figure purposefully inconsistent with the industry-standard figure shared with County, Real Estate industry, and Building Permitting, Code Enforcement and Zoning. (https://www.cityofberkeley.info/gis/)