2012-COH-A Technical Assistance Report Evaluating Property Tax Policies and Administrative Practices in Hawaii County

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of Conveyances of the State Department of Land and Natural Resources. The Division receives building permit data from the Public Works Department and cadastral maps from the Planning Department. It receives support from the Corporation Counsel and the Data Systems Department. It also has arrangements to receive Multiple Listing Service data and data from escrow firms. Hawaii has a dual system of land tenure. That is, there is a "regular" deed recordation system. There also is a title registration (the Land Court). The state has a high level of multiple ownership of property. The transfer tax has progressive rates, but the rates overall are low (the rate is 0.1 percent on houses worth $600,000 or less if the purchaser is eligible for a homeowner's exemption). The interplay between land-use zoning, actual land use, the Division's determinations of tax class and highest and best use for valuation purposes is unclear (as will be discussed in Section 6). However, "urban" land zones (residential, commercial, resort, and industrial constitute 1.3 percent of total land area, while urban land uses constitute 1.5 percent. Mixed land uses constitute 22.5 percent of total area. Insularity is unsurprising both on an island and in property taxation generally—most policymakers and property tax administrators perforce are intimately familiar with their situation and scarcely aware of systems elsewhere. In addition, bureaucrats can exhibit insularity in their day-to-day activities. It seems apparent that greater openness in the operation of the real property tax system would be desirable to address pervasive suspicions of irregularities. 2.2 Workload Workloads express legal requirements in numerical terms so that resource requirements and efficiency measures can be estimated (see section 5). Of course, an assessor's work load always is a moving target as new development occurs and property prices change. However, snapshots of parcel counts and transaction or event statistics such as sales, new construction, exemption applications and appeals provide an indication of workloads. Unfortunately, the County does not produce an accessible compilation of such statistics. Nor does it produce statistics on work accomplished or on productivity rates. However, fragmentary statistics can be found in scanned documents in the County of Hawai'i Current Data Book and in data compiled by the Real Property Assessment Division of the City and County of Honolulu. 12 At the time of our review there were approximately 140,000 taxable parcels of real estate in the County. Table I provides a breakdown. Although definitions of the County's classes were not in the material we received, it appears that there are at least 56,000 residential properties as they are usually defined and that there are about 14,000 commercial and 12 http://records.co.hawaii.hi.us/Weblink8/Browse.aspx?dbid=1&startid=27952 and http://www.realpropertyhonolulu.com/portal/rpadcms/Reports;jsessionid=8D0BFB306E415 IAC990EE70BE13BAA8F?parent=REPORTS. 7