PORT ANGELES – Property owners in Clallam County are getting their new assessment statements in the mail this week from the Assessor’s office and that always brings up renewed questions about why a property’s value may have gone up, down or remained the same.

We caught up with County Assessor Pam Rushton and got her to talk about how those values are calculated. She says the county is divided into 6 sections with one section getting onsite, or physical, inspections each year. This year it was Port Angeles and surrounding areas.

“So that was what was physically inspected, and then you might have seen us throughout the county picking up new construction. And we consider new construction anything that had a building permit or should have had a building permit. We pick up this new construction every year, you know, it’s called discovery. And otherwise we do statistical analysis on the entire county.”

If your assessed value went up considerably and you made no significant changes to your property, Rushton says it may be that your neighbor’s property values are going up and bringing you with them.

“The market is usually the biggest adjustment factor because that’s usually when people haven’t made any changes to theirr house, but just the market is increasing. Most people have seen what their neighbors are selling for or listing for. That’s what we’re looking at, too. One sale doesn’t make a market but a whole bunch of sales do, so we’re always looking at a large sampling of sales and making adjustments accordingly to what’s going on with the marketplace.”

Rushton says if you don’t get your assessment in the mail this week you should contact her office. They may have the wrong address on file and need an update.

She also says everyone should check their entry on the Assessor’s website now and then.

“I always encourage people to look at our website to to make sure that our data is correct, because we don’t want that data wrong either. You know, if we’ve transposed a number…I mean, we’re human, we make mistakes too. So if there’s anything wrong with the data, please contact us we want to get that correct too.

Rushton says the bad news is their website is down today while their software vendor updates some important information. She admits the timing couldn’t be worse.