Buchanan County will freeze property tax assessments this year, Assessor Scot Van Meter said Monday.

This lingering question — Would property appraisals increase despite a bad real estate market? — likely provides a measure of relief until 2011 for most homeowners and business owners.

And combined with the failure of the St. Joseph School District’s levy, the assessment freeze guarantees that property taxes will actually decline in St. Joseph unless the district receives approval for a levy increase later this year.

The assessor’s office had been waiting on Missouri State Tax Commission studies to determine whether to perform a “mass reassessment” this year. The studies still haven’t come, and time is too short for a reassessment, so Mr. Van Meter said he made the decision to freeze assessments.

“I’m out of time to give the taxpayers that (would be) getting increases ample time to evaluate it,” Mr. Van Meter said.

The assessor’s office will mail reassessment letters this week, but only to owners of newly constructed buildings and apartment buildings, Mr. Van Meter said.

Reassessments are evaluated in odd years, though the state and county assessors can forego increases for four or sometimes six years.

The decision to not reassess this year carries a double benefit for property owners. Overall assessment values are based partly on property sales from two years before. If reappraisals had been performed this year, they would’ve been based on the much stronger real estate market of 2006/2007.

Instead, in 2011, reappraisals will be based partly on sales values from 2008/2009.

Buchanan County last had a countywide reassessment in 2005. The process uses broad, baseline values from home sales, then assessors go house-by-house to recalculate individual property values.

“We will do a full-blown mass (reassessment) in ’11,” Mr. Van Meter said.

Mr. Van Meter’s office does not set tax rates, or levies, which can increase or decrease the actual tax bill. Those levies are set by the local school district, city, county and libraries.

Joe Blumberg can be reached

at joeblumberg@npgco.com.