2006 Property Tax Bills To Go In Mail Friday

Been meaning to post this from last week's Source:

Aug. 21, 2008 -- Property tax bills for fiscal year 2006 are scheduled to be mailed by Friday, even though no final ruling has been handed down in a longstanding court case that challenges whether the territory's property tax system is fair and equitable.

In 2000, a group of commercial property owners took the V.I. government to court, alleging the government was assessing commercial properties based on replacement rather than actual property value -- a method, they said, that resulted in inflated assessments. Thomas Moore, then the sitting U.S. District Court judge, agreed, and in 2003 ordered the government to conduct a thorough revaluation of commercial and residential properties. Meanwhile, property-tax values were frozen at 1998 levels until the project was complete and a new assessment system -- which had to be certified by a court-appointed special master -- was put in place. The court case prevented the government from issuing property tax bills for 2006 and 2007.