Panel orders truck stops’ appraisals

• By DAVID J. MITCHELL
• Advocate Florida parishes bureau
• Published: Aug 20, 2008 - Page: 5B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The Louisiana Tax Commission wants another opinion on the value of five St. Helena Parish video-poker truck stops and related properties whose owners are appealing their 2007 property tax assessments.

The five-member commission ordered on Tuesday that independent appraisals be conducted in advance of a “correctness” hearing on the truck stops’ fair market values. The five-member commission ordered the hearing Tuesday at its Baton Rouge offices without setting a date.

Property tax assessments are derived from fair market value. Assessments are used to compute individual annual property taxes.

Jacobs Entertainment Inc., Golden, Colo., which ultimately controls the video-poker truck stops through other corporations or Jacobs’ private owners, has appealed property tax assessments that raised the casino properties’ combined 2007 tax bill by 350 percent.

St. Helena Parish Assessor Wesley Blades’ reassessments are for 2007, the year before the required quadrennial reassessment under way this year.

In directing the commission’s appraisal division to do the review, the commission also unanimously rejected arguments by both sides that had held out the potential to end the dispute quickly on technical grounds.

In a deposition filed into the commission record, Blades said he reassessed the properties after he found out through deeds filed at the parish courthouse or from a former owner that the video-poker truck stops sold for more than what they had been assessed at, in some cases millions more.

The five truck stops are along La. 16 near St. Helena Parish’s line with Livingston or Tangipahoa parishes, which do not have video poker.

The truck stops that offer video poker play are the Lucky Magnolia Truck Stop and Casino, Forest Gold Truck Stop and Casino, St. Helena Express, Amite Plaza Truck Stop and Silver Fox Casino and a connected bar and a convenience store.

“He shouldn’t have done it in the first place, I guess, is the bottom line and when he did do it, he did it wrong,” attorney Linda Akchin, a lawyer with Kean Miller, said of the assessor’s reassessments.

Akchin argued that under commission rules, Blades should have reassessed all property in the parish within a certain classification, not just the video-poker truck stops open in the parish at the time.

Carter countered that there is no statute or constitutional provision that prohibits Blades from reassessing in a non-reassessment year. State law and commission rules say that reappraisal and reassessment of real property must happen “at least every four years.”

“I think it’s malfeasance in office for him (Blades) to not take some action, and I think everyone in his situation would do what he did,” Carter said.