ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – A Ukrainian family turns to FOX 2 for help. They are not at all happy with how the St. Louis County Assessor’s Office valued their home.
The appraisal went from $170,500 to $228,000—a 34% increase.
Homeowner Roman Dzhurinskiy says it doesn’t sit well with him.
“No, I don’t think I was treated fairly,” he said. “They don’t do what they’re supposed to do. They don’t drive by.”
Dzhurinskiy says he’s been fighting this for a long time now and has gotten nowhere.
“Each property is grossly overestimated for many years. It’s true, because I know there are some property values in our subdivision that went down,” he said. “It’s unfair, because this assessment that I received, they added $58,000 for my improvements.”
FOX 2 contacted the county assessor’s office. A spokeswoman, Sarah Siegel, says home values significantly increased across the county.
“This year, we had about 26,000 appeals out of approximately 400,000 tax parcels,” she said. “What happened was that values went up throughout St. Louis County and, in some cases, they went up quite a lot. I’m not an appraiser; I can’t give you the specifics as to why the values went up.”
Siegel claims their office provided a thorough home inspection in this case.
“Our records show that an appraiser from our office when out and visited this office physically,” she said. “Visited it last April as part of our process, and then it was determined that that would be the correct market value, that would be the amount that we believe the owner could sell his property for if he had put it on the market on January 1.”
She says Dzhurinskiy is welcome to appeal to the Board of Equalization and the State Tax Commission if he doesn’t like the answers he’s getting.
“The bottom line is nobody is happy if they think their taxes might go up, but a lot of people are happy when they find that the value of their biggest asset has gone up,” she said.