The City of Plymouth hopes to simplify work for the Marshall County Assessor’s Office by combining some of its land parcels for tax purposes.
City Attorney Sean Surrisi presented the proposal to the Common Council Monday. “Every year, they look at assessing properties throughout the county,” he explained. “But every three years, they have to do – I’m probably butchering this – but something like a quarter of the county that gets a more in-depth treatment. And they have to do reports on all the different parcels.”
He said that work can add up. River Park Square, for example, contains between 70 and 100 individual parcels. “Even though these are non-taxable properties,” Surrisi said, “each one has a separate tax ID number and they have to generate a separate report analyzing all of them. She said also when they contract with the company that does the pictometry aerial images, they have a charge that’s somehow based on the number of parcels that they’re taking pictures of.”
Surrisi said the Assessor’s Office has offered to look for clusters of parcels and go about combining them. “It wouldn’t change the legal description or anything having to do with the actual land that we own,” he said. “But from their purposes, they would assign one tax ID number for a grouping of parcels, and that would save them on reporting the next cycle when they come around and costs for the imaging and things like that.”
The Common Council voted to allow the Assessor’s Office to proceed with that process. Once that list of parcels is finalized, council members will have a chance to verify it, before officially requesting the change with the Marshall County Auditor’s Office.
