You asked what the General Assembly's rationale was for enacting CGS § 12-63d, which prohibits a local assessor from changing the assessed value of property that is sold or transferred based solely on the sale price.

Section 12-63d was passed in 1988. It was not proposed as a separate bill but was an amendment to a larger property tax relief bill (sSB 465 - PA 88-321). The overall bill was mainly concerned with raising qualifying incomes for the circuit breaker property tax relief program and providing tax credits for residential property owners affected by revaluations.

The provision that became § 12-63d was first added to the bill by a Senate floor amendment (Senate "C") sponsored by Senator Win Smith. In describing his amendment, Senator Smith said that he was offering it to respond to a recent Connecticut Supreme Court decision that allowed Rocky Hill's tax assessor to increase the assessment on the Century Hills apartment complex between general revaluations, based on its sale price (84 Century Ltd. Partnership v. Board of Tax Review, 207 Conn. 250). His amendment was intended to override the court's decision.

Senator Smith and other senators who spoke in favor of the amendment argued that allowing assessors to raise assessments on individual properties based on recent sales would be inequitable because it could lead to identical properties being taxed differently. According to Senator Smith, the amendment "would . . . require that the assessors use the same bases for cost as was determined at the revaluation date. So you would not have the inequity of someone coming into a community, buying into a neighborhood and finding their tax bill could be one, two, three times higher than their neighbor, same house, same circumstance. " (Senate Transcript, April 27, 1988). No Senator spoke against the amendment.

When the bill went to the House, Senate "C" was rejected but its exact wording was incorporated into House Amendment "A. " Representative Smoko stated that the wording was intended to address "the risk of having the disparity between the valuation of comparable pieces of property being even more severe than would exist otherwise. " Representative Schlesinger, speaking in favor of the amendment, argued that revaluing an individual parcel of property based on a sale would be wrong and unfair. "There is no reason why one property should be assessed higher just because it was sold when the neighboring property could be just as under-assessed as the property that was sold," he said.

In the House, only Representative Emmons spoke against the amendment. She argued that it was too restrictive and that assessors should be allowed to increase assessments in situations when there had been no comparable sales and a single sale indicates that a property is undervalued (House Transcript, May 2, 1988).

JL: eh