Impact of 12-31-2010 Tornados, Severe Storms

Attention Property Owners:

If your property was impacted significantly by either the tornados, high winds, or severe storms that occurred on Friday December 31, 2010 please inform the assessor's office at your earliest convenience with the details. If you are a neighbor to someone who experienced extensive damage, please feel free to notify us on their behalf. We have spent time going through the news reports gathering information, reviewing helicopter aerial video surveillance, talking with members of the community, and will spend time canvassing the area in the upcoming weeks, but we may not fully realize the extent of damage from the outside from our vantage point and will need your help. In the meantime we are compiling a list of properties to go see as we become aware of them.

Extensive Structural Damage
Significantly impacted property would include fully destroyed or missing buildings, nearly destroyed buildings, buildings that sustained heavy damage and will require a significant cost-to-cure to make repairs, buildings that have been deemed uninhabitable (either permanently or temporarily), and buildings that require repairs extensive enough that the repair time is measured in months, exterior or interior walls that will need to be removed and replaced; in other words, extensive structural damage. These types of property may be considered to have suffered tremendous loss in value which is more or less permanent until cured (if even possible). If your or your neighbor's property sustained structural damage to any structure, please let us know as soon as possible.

Cosmetic Non-structural Damage
Properties that only require cosmetic non-structural repairs (such as some new roofing material not including roof decking or trussing, replacement of some missing siding, or replacement of a garage door panel, or replacement of some window glass for instance) where the structure itself is still intact, uncompromised, and habitable are not generally considered to have suffered a loss of value since these types of repair are made quickly and are usually considered normal wear and tear type maintenance. However, the exception to this is: if there is a significant amount of cosmetic damage to multiple components of the structure then we may need to address this in the assessment. Bringing our attention to cosmetic damage will help us ensure that no property in the path of these storms is overlooked or given due consideration.

Our Intent
It is our goal to document the damage and make appropriate adjustments as necessary on the assessor's assessment rolls for the 2011 tax year. Ad valorem tax day in Missouri is January 1 and loss of value for these properties should be reflected in the upcoming tax year. To this end, it may be helpful for us to see insurance reports, construction repair estimates, or other similar documentation of damages and the cost of damage. Damage adjustments that are made for January 1, 2011 will remain in place until January 1, 2012 when sufficient repairs are completed, or new construction has replaced demolished structures, or the buildings are again habited on a regular basis. We will review affected areas sometime around the end of 2011 to make this determination. In the meantime I would encourage property owners to be in communciation with us early in the 2011 reassessment process so the decision making can be handled in a timely and fair manner.

Thank you and my best regards to our property owners,

Kevin D. Rasmussen