Campbell County personal property taxes to decrease

Campbell County car owners may find that their personal property tax bills are lower than expected when they arrive in October.

However, those bills won’t decline as much as proposed during the county’s budget hearings.

Tuesday, supervisors unanimously approved revising the county’s personal property tax relief to 56 percent — down from 63 percent estimated in the budget.

Why? Because the county only recently finished assessing all vehicles eligible for personal property tax relief, said Margie Cartwright, deputy commissioner of the revenue.

“We did the estimate when we compiled it earlier based on the estimate of the value we thought we were going to have, and we just didn’t have everything up to date,” Cartwright said. “At that point, we didn’t have all the vehicles assessed.”

The state doles out personal property tax relief to localities in a lump sum to be split evenly for all eligible vehicles. Eligible vehicles are those used for personal use, Cartwright said. The number of vehicles eligible this year increased over what was proposed in May, so the amount of tax relief is reduced on each bill, she said.

While the percentage went down from what was proposed this spring, it’s still more tax relief in 2009 than the previous two years. In 2007 and 2008, personal property tax relief was 53 percent, Cartwright said.

Another reason tax bills may go down is because the vehicle’s assessed value generally declines, Cartwright said. “We were not affected as badly as other localities were because we use the average retail value, so our values declined, but not anything that’s going to be a major change.”