WENATCHEE — A little over a month after sending out new property values notices, Chelan County is sending out revised statements for 1,000 properties that were priced too high.

“We are still getting our feet wet with our new computer system,” said Assessor Russ Griffith.

In November, the county sent out 11,000 new value notices for property in the Cashmere School District and an area stretching from Orondo and Cherry streets in Wenatchee to the county’s southern boundary. The values are used to determine property tax bills.

After the statements went out, Griffith said his office began receiving “hundreds and hundreds of calls” from people questioning the jump in their property values.

Griffith said he expected a certain amount of “sticker shock.” Though the real estate market and home sales were dropping around the county, property values increased 70 or more percent for most properties.

He said that while the values were not based on the peak market prices in 2007 through mid 2008, they were established on home sales in the latter part of 2008, when the housing market was stronger than it is now.

Once the calls and appeals of the new values started rolling in, Griffith said his office began looking into each case. In some, there were changes to homes that assessors simply can’t see as they do their evaluations of each property. A home may have suffered structural damage, or the square footage is not the same — things that change a value.

But in some cases, the Assessor’s Office staff determined that it was technical errors while inputting information into their new computer system that messed up property values for whole neighborhoods.

Values in an area of Wenatchee Heights were tens of thousands of dollars higher than they should have been because staff was unknowingly entering data in twice.

“Call it pilot error,” Griffiths said.

The office revalued many properties in the Forest Ridge subdivision below Mission Ridge as well.

The notices with corrected values were sent out last Thursday.

Griffith said he feels confident that the county is ready to begin annual property assessments for all 45,000 parcels in the county starting next year.

He said the new computer system allows his office to quickly determine and update values in whole neighborhoods. The computer system the county has been using since the 1970s is “bulletproof,” he said, and has never failed. But it does not allow staff to input information on more than one property at a time, and cannot look at neighborhoods as a whole to determine property values, he said.

State law requires county’s to switch to annual assessments.

“I am feeling really good about moving to annual assessments,” Griffith said. “We’ve learned a lot in the last year.”

Michelle McNiel: 664-7152

mcniel@wenatcheeworld.com