Hugh's Worthless Blog

I finally heard back from the Saint Louis County Board of Equalization to see if I would have my home assessment value reduced. Unfortunately they decided their assessment valuation was just fine and they would not budge on the number. I was hoping to at least get it down by 10% or so but they must not have liked my data that I supplied with my appeal request. I included my report from ValueAppeal.com which I spent $99 on back in May, along with the county's decision on my neighbor's house which is assessed almost $50,000 less than ours and the sales data for a larger house up the street which sold for almost $20,000 less than our assessment just last year. There is now another house for sale on our street which has a sales price only $15,000 over our assessed valuation, but which will never sell for that much. That house has a floor plan this is an almost identical mirror image to our own but the kitchen is still from 1950 and the basement layout leaves a lot to be desir...

Yesterday I was one of the select few citizens in the St Louis metropolitan area who was able to make a difference in their government; I was able to vote on a Monday! It was the special election between two incumbent Democratic state representatives who shared almost identical voting records, Stacey Newman and Susan Carlson. Since their one vote difference primary election in August was too close to call after some voting errors were discovered , the county decided to have a special re-election just for our district to allow for a definite winner to be cast. In the past few weeks I have been heavily bombarded with postal mailings, automated phone calls and then finally real human phone calls (one from the actual Stacey Newman herself) asking me to go and vote. So yesterday I did my civic duty and spent an extra 5 minutes while going home from work and voted. I was expecting that after such a close election before and so many mailings and calls the voter turnout would be much high...