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(Continued from Page 1) evidenced in the total for Rappahannock real estate. Interestingly, the smaller, three-fold increases came for properties with interposing buffer lots between them and the landfill while actual adjoining properties had larger five-fold increases in appraised value following the 1982 reassessment.
There were no sales figures for properties near the landfill to compare with sale prices of comparable property elsewhere in the county. Judging from the records, the only land to have changed hands since the Clark landfill opened is one tract which passed to heirs upon the death of the landowner.
Assessments dropped 25 percent
Years of litigation over alleged danger to groundwater preceded the opening of Montgomery County’s Oaks Sanitary Landfill in 1982. To reflect the environmental risk, tax assessors in this rural Maryland county applied a 25 percent “economic obsolescence” decrease to several properties near and adjacent to the landfill. The depreciation was applied in 1984 to the previously assessed value from 1981, the year before the landfill opened.
According to the Montgomery County Assessment Office, “the basis for this depreciation was largely political and subjective,” reports the National Solid Wastes Management Association’s Technical Bulletin 861. “It was not made with regard to market data; instead, it accommodated area residents” who believed that their properties’ value had fallen. “In effect, the reduction was a form of compensation to the property owners who felt their property was adversely impacted,” the bulletin concludes.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency attempted to determine a landfill’s impact on property values using market data in a 1972 study prepared by General Behavior
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89.5%