A new website designed to clear up property taxes causes confusion in Tarrant County
Paul Clark, a longtime Tarrant County resident, was intrigued when he received an orange postcard in the mail recently from the Tarrant Appraisal District.
It wasn’t an appraisal notice, but instead directed Clark to TarrantTaxInfo.com, a site where it said he could find information on his 2020 property taxes and proposed actions from local taxing units.
The site didn’t have much detail on its homepage, but it did allow him to search for a breakdown of his property taxes by entering either his name, property ID or address.
“Every query that I tried, it would not return any records,” Clark said.
Wendy Burgess, Tarrant County’s Tax Assessor-Collector, said that’s because the site had crashed for a short period on Aug. 3 when so many residents tried to access it at once. But Clark wasn’t the only resident who has experienced issues trying to access the new site.
Jeff Law, the chief appraiser for the Tarrant Appraisal District, said that some residents have entered the site’s URL into a search engine, like Google or Bing, rather than directly into the address bar. From there, they’ve been directed to different websites that have charged them $1 to $2 look up the info — rather than the official site that allows them look it up at no cost.
“Basically they’re selling you the information, rather than just getting it for free,” Law said. “But that’s the kind of websites that we’re finding that when people enter that URL into a search engine, they wind up getting directed to a property search type website. And they think that it’s our website, and it’s not.”
“If you get on a website that wants to charge you something, you are not on the right website,” Law said.
Launched on Aug. 1, the Tarrant Tax Info website was mandated under Senate Bill 2, the sweeping property tax reform bill passed by the Texas Legislature in 2019.
The focus of the bill was largely on the 3.5% cap it imposes on property tax revenues for cities and counties. Any higher, and taxing units will need voter approval. But the bill also added measures aimed at increasing transparency for residents, like its name the “Texas Property Tax Reform and Transparency Act of 2019” suggests.
As part of the bill, appraisal districts were required to create a searchable property tax database that allows residents to look up their tax rates and proposed ones, see information on public hearings to change tax rates, and submit comments on proposed changes directly to taxing units through the site.
But Clark said most of that isn’t clear from the notice he received.
“It’s so random. And it just says, ‘Here’s this’ and it doesn’t say anything else,” Clark said. “And so unless you have some degree of curiosity that you’re going to actually log on and go to the trouble to understand what this program is all about, I think you’re just going to put it in the trash can with all the other postcard things that you get and you’re never going to think about it again.”
The postcard itself doesn’t mention Senate Bill 2, that this is a newly created database made because of it or go into detail about what you can do through the site. The site itself provides a bit more detail, but could be much clearer and include an FAQ, Clark said.
“I think if this was a program that you wanted the public to know about and you wanted it to be used, then there would be an education component,” Clark said.
Law stressed that the site and its rollout is a work-in-progress, and that while it meets the basic requirements of the law, feedback will be taken into account to improve it.
While TAD was tasked with creating the database and sending notices, Law said it should also be on the onus of the taxing entities themselves — who must update information on tax rates and public hearings in the database — to help educate the public. Law said TAD paid roughly $25,000 to the Farmers Branch-based BIS Consulting firm to create the site, and just under $200,000 to mail out the postcards to every property owner in Tarrant County.
“We hardly had time to even budget for it,” Law said.
Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock and chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, was the author of the House version of Senate Bill 2. Burrows said he envisioned that appraisal districts would have most of the responsibility in the database’s creation, and that local taxing entities would help promote it as a resource.
“I would hope appraisal districts would take ownership and really appreciate the fact that this website is now in existence,” Burrows said. “People have a lot of questions about who’s raising their taxes, and it’s not necessarily just the change and the increases in appraised values, and this helps them better explain this.”
Burgess said her office has had to do a lot of explaining. As the county’s tax assessor-collector, her contact information is required to be printed on the notice under the new law — even though her office is not the one in charge of the site.
“It’s just a little confusing,” Burgess said. “But I am responsible to the taxpayers, and so I’m a part of the process whether this is my site or not. And I want to help educate them to the best of my abilities so it can clear up confusion on the usefulness of the website.”
Burgess has tried to clear up discrepancies by posting on the county’s website and on Facebook. And the city of Fort Worth posted a notice about the new site as well.
“Because this is a new tool, we haven’t fully explored how we can use it to help educate residents,” Michelle Gutt, a city spokeswoman, wrote in an email Friday.
The city is transitioning to a new website that will launch in October, and is assessing whether it can integrate the database and the public feedback section. Any feedback that is submitted by residents would be shared with staff and elected officials, Gutt said.
And despite the confusion around the new site, Law said he hopes Tarrant County residents ultimately understand it’s a free, accessible resource that’s meant to add transparency to their property tax estimates and help them have a say.
“The appraisal district is one leg of the stool, the property owner is one leg of the stool, but the elected officials and the setting of the tax rate is that third leg of the stool,” Law said. “And I think this is a shift in the legislature’s intent to say, ‘You need to pay more attention to what your elected officials are doing in setting the tax rate.’”
This story was originally published August 10, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
