AUBURN — An error in more than half of the city’s property tax bills arriving in mail boxes this week resulted in incorrect amounts due, according to City Manager Clinton Deschene.

The city will send supplementary tax bills to all 9,325 Auburn real estate taxpayers next week, and the city has pushed the due date for the first half of the bill to Oct. 1. Real estate taxpayers should disregard all tax bills received so far, he said.

“Not all of the bills are incorrect, but we are sending new bills to everyone,” Deschene said Wednesday. “Rather than create more confusion about which bill is correct and which is not, we are resending all of them.”

Personal property taxpayers were not affected by the error, and Deschene said the city will not send new bills to them. Personal property taxes are levied on business equipment and assets.

City councilors approved sending tax bills at their Aug. 18 meeting. That included a tax rate that was 20 cents higher than what they had approved in June because of reductions in the city’s assessed value.

Deschene said it appears this latest error occurred when the vendor hired to print the city’s tax bills used the 2013-2014 real estate values database instead of the 2014-15 database for about 4,902 of the real estate property tax bills.

The result is that about 80 percent of the bills those taxpayers received were higher than what they actually owed. That represents 4,057 taxpayers.

Those taxpayers will see a reduced payment in the bills, which should be mailed next week, Deschene said. The remaining 845 property taxpayers will see their tax bills increase, compared to the incorrect bills. Deschene said 417 of those will see their tax bills increase by less than $20.

staylor@sunjournal.com

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