The DeKalb County property appraiser is known as the Chief Appraiser for the DeKalb County Board of Tax Assessors (BTA). Click here for a DeKalb County property appraiser. Together, the BTA and Chief Appraiser administer the functions of the DeKalb County tax assessment office. The tax assessment office is responsible for valuing all of the real estate and taxable personal property for the purposes of taxation. This is also known as ad valorem tax, where ad valorem is Latin for “according to value.”
The DeKalb County Commissioners, elected officials that represent the various voting districts in the county, appoint the Board of Tax Assessors. The BTA is a part time job, typically meeting once a month. The BTA finds and hires a Chief Appraiser to manage the Tax Assessor offices for them.
The current Chief Appraiser is Calvin Hicks, who has been in the role since 2009. Mr. Hicks was previously Chief Appraiser for Monroe, Bibb, Baldwin, and Richmond counties in Georgia. Mr. Hicks has the Certified Assessment Evaluator (CAE) designation awarded by the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO).
In a large urban county like DeKalb the Chief Appraiser generally has deputies and managers that handle most of the workflow and staff issues. I have never seen Mr. Hicks at the Board of Equalization (BOE), but because the BOE is supposed to be independent of the BTA he probably would not want to give the impression that he spends time there. When he was new to DeKalb County he did participate in mediation on a hotel property tax appeal that I had filed.
The DeKalb County Tax Assessors surprised thousands of property owners last year when their taxable values increased as much as 100%. The Tax Assessors quickly admitted there had been mistakes made and reissued assessment notices to approximately 3,000 property owners. Given the scale of the work that the DeKalb County chief appraiser is responsible for there are bound to be some mistakes made.
DeKalb County is not alone. In the past two years there have been (costly) mistakes made by Fulton County and Gwinnett County too. It doesn’t help when the Georgia General Assembly changes the property tax laws in the state, causing major changes to be made to the tax assessment systems and software. The ink on Senate Bill 346, which passed in 2010, is just now dry and there are other bills attempting to change the law further currently looking for support.
