By Ken de la Bastide
Tribune staff writer
Kokomo —
The Center Township Assessor’s office has notified General Motors that it has changed the personal property assessed value on equipment the company filed in May.
Sheila Pullen said Friday a notice was sent to GM that the personal property assessed value was changed by her office back to the 2009 pay 2010 levels.
“I put it back to what it was for this year,” she said.
For the 2010 tax year, Delphi Electronics & Safety submitted a personal property assessed value of $217.9 million for equipment that was sold to GM last year when Delphi emerged from bankruptcy.
In May, GM submitted an assessed value on the equipment at $7.4 million.
Pullen said GM also dropped the tax abatement deduction from $39 million to $524,100 for 2010 taxes payable in 2011.
“The abatement that Delphi filed for 2009 payable in 2010 was considerably higher than what GM filed for 2010 taxes payable in 2011,” she said.
Pullen said she suspects that GM dropped the tax abatement by the same percentage as the drop of the personal property assessed value.
“There is a lot of things in their filing that I don’t understand,” she said. “They dropped the value of the equipment to less than scrap.”
Pullen said she hopes GM will answer the county’s questions when negotiations start on the assessed value of the personal property.
“We want to know how did GM get to the values they reported,” she said. “For the taxpayers of Center Township, I hope we can settle the assessed value with GM as we did with Chrysler.”
If an agreement can’t be reached, there would be a hearing before the local Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals, to establish the value for tax purposes of the equipment. Either side can appeal that ruling to the Indiana Board of Tax Review and the Indiana Tax court, according to Pullen.
Chrysler in July amended its personal property assessed value from $814.7 million reported in May to $92 million.
Howard County and Kokomo officials reached an agreement with Chrysler last week in which the company agreed to withdraw the lower value, pay the same taxes as this year and to assess equipment based on the price old Chrysler originally paid when it was placed into service — not on the price paid through the 2009 bankruptcy proceedings.
