In response to a Colorado Supreme Court decision that set a new precedent for property tax regulations, the Summit County Assessor’s Office has refunded nearly $646,000 in property taxes and might have to refund more.
In February, three Summit County property tax cases made their way to the state Supreme Court, enabling the court “to unravel the mysteries of what constitutes residential land,” as Justice William Hood III put it in the court’s opinion.
In each case, property owners argued that properties they owned, which were considered to be vacant land, actually should be considered residential land.
The county won on two of the three cases. However, it lost the third, which looked at the use of land and led to changes in the Assessor’s Reference Library, the guidebook for county assessors.
In the case, Marilyn and Marc Hogan argued that one of their three properties should be classified as residential land because it contains an unpaved driveway.
Colorado law states that residential land “means a parcel … of land … upon which residential improvements are located and that is used as a unit in conjunction with the residential improvements located thereon.”
At the time, the Summit County assessor did not classify the third parcel as “residential” because it didn’t have a residential improvement, which is defined as a building or a portion of a building.
However, the court found that the plain language in the law does not require a parcel to have a residential improvement. A landowner can satisfy the use requirement by “using multiple parcels of land together as a collective unit of residential property,” according to the court document.
