Ventura County Supervisor Peter Foy said: "We're not at the bottom yet. We could see another reduction in values. . . . It's not a good situation. It'd be nice if people felt their investment in their home was still what it used to be."
Property taxes constitute a majority of the money that a county can spend as it sees fit, unlike federal funds, which are designated for specific programs.
In Los Angeles County, the assessment rolls include 2.3 million parcels and about 300,000 pieces of business equipment, boats and airplanes. The county receives about a third of property tax revenue, cities get a quarter, school districts take 20% and community redevelopment areas and special districts combined receive 20%.
Despite the housing slump and the lowered assessments, L.A. County officials anticipate a 5% rise in overall assessed property value because of new developments and continuing home sales, which trigger higher assessments. But they worry that it will not be enough to cover an anticipated shortfall in state funds for important services. California's per capita state budget deficit is the second-largest in the country.
"We still don't know, and we probably won't know until this summer, what the state is going to do to us," Yaroslavsky said. "They typically fund social services, and that is the core of what we provide."
Meanwhile, officials throughout the region said they hoped that improvements in their reassessment procedures would prevent massive numbers of assessment appeals hearings that clogged the system during the housing slump of the mid-1990s. During that crisis, the number of people in Los Angeles County appealing their assessments jumped from about 10,000 to 110,000, and the hearing process to evaluate the appeals took as long as two years.
"We are trying to be proactive so that we never have that many appeals again," said Los Angeles County Assessor Rick Auerbach, "because we don't have any more people to handle appeals now than we did then."
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garrett.therolf@latimes.com
Times staff writer Paloma Esquivel contributed to this report.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Cutting the government's cut
Why are homeowners allowed to have their property taxes reduced?
California voters in 1978 approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that allows a temporary reduction in assessed value when property declines in value.
How does the process work?
