Boat taxes mystery unsolved

If it were an episode of “Scooby Doo” or a volume of “Nancy Drew,” it might be called “The Mystery of the Skyrocketing Boat Taxes.”

But the Newport Beach boat owners who received large tax bills this summer are still waiting for the plot twist that reveals the final impact to their wallets.

For Dan Runner, a retiree who lives on Balboa Island, the enigma began in June when he received the annual bill from the Orange County Assessor’s office with the assessed value of his boat and the property tax due.

He’s had the Grand Banks 36-foot cabin cruiser since 1998, when he bought it used for $50,000.

“It’s a sturdy old cruising boat — they don’t go fast or anything. That suits me,” Runner said. His tax bill for the boat had gone down by about 7.5% every year through 2006, hitting a low of $169 last year.

So this year’s $751 bill was a shock, with the boat assessed at $72,215 — a 345% increase from the previous year’s assessment.

He called the assessor’s office and got his boat assessment reduced by $32,000, but he didn’t get an explanation for the difference.

Runner wasn’t the only one. At a recent meeting of the 450-member Newport Mooring Assn., which is for boaters who moor their crafts in Newport Harbor, the talk was about higher tax bills and who had received them.

“For many years the boats were depreciating each year by 5 or 10%. All of a sudden this year we find the values have either tripled or quadrupled,” said Mark Sites, a mooring association board member. Sites own boat assessment went from $19,560 in 2006 to $63,641 this year.

“We’ve called the assessor different times and we seem to be getting different stories as to why this has occurred,” he said.

Orange County Assessor Webster Guillory thought the explanation could be boat assessments may have fallen below their fair market value, which the law requires him to charge. He didn’t comment on specific boat owners’ cases because he hadn’t looked at their records.

In general, he said, assessors use a boat “blue book” to check values, they get information from the harbor master, and when they need to, they’ll go out and physically look at the boats.

“The record shows that some of the boats got a little bit out of market,” Guillory said. “Some of them were brought back to market this year, so they may have gone up as much as 20%.”

With more than 30,000 boats registered in Orange County, Guillory said the level of detail applied to each boat assessment varies from year to year.

He’s responsible for assessing more than a million units of property altogether, so sometimes mistakes in valuation occur. County officials realized earlier this year they hadn’t collected taxes on boat slips in Dana Point for several years, which led to huge catch-up bills.

But regarding Newport, Guillory said he has only gotten about 10 or 15 calls. He should expect a few more. Sites is still looking for answers about where the boat tax money goes. It is turned over to the state, but some comes back to the county and, he’s heard, the city of Newport Beach.

And Sandy Doezie is trying to sort out her dispute with the assessor over the value of a boat her husband built from a kit for less than $35,000. This year, Guillory’s office initially assessed it at $85,000.

The boat has no electronics, no shower, and not even a bathroom — features a manufactured boat that looks like theirs would probably have, and which would increase its value.

Doezie said she tried to explain and even sent detailed information on what had been spent to built and repair the boat.

When she asked if an appraiser could actually look at her boat, she said, she was told, “We can’t do that. We can’t go and visit every boat in the harbor.”

Boat owners said they’re most frustrated they received no notice from the assessor’s office that they might see a jump in their tax this year, and they’ve had trouble getting answers about why it happened.

“It just seems like the tax assessor’s office went crazy this year,” said Runner, the Balboa Island boat owner. “Maybe it’s a reflection of them not doing their job all these years.”

Some have gotten their assessments reduced by calling Guillory’s office, and they should perhaps count themselves lucky they’re not being charged retroactively for earlier years when their boats may have been below market value. Charging such back taxes is legal, Guillory said.

“It’s kind of a catch-22 that you put yourself in sometimes,” Guillory said. “If you bring it up and throw it in our face, the law says, ‘Hey Webster, do your job.’”