A good way to start off the year right is to have your property taxes paid up in full from the last year. With the year ending on Monday, property taxes would be delinquent if they weren’t paid in full yet. Meaning the property taxes of the residential kind are due.

There are four different property divisions: Passenger cars and trucks, residential property, property of utilities in a business and all other property not otherwise classified in the other three.

If you are like me, then you have noticed that property taxes for your residential property have been rising in the last seven years exponentially. At first it was only $20 per year more, then it was $40 and now it is $60 to $70 more than the years before.

As I have been reading in the paper, there have been reports from the Alabama Department of Revenue critical of property tax assessment procedures which created a record number of tax appeals this past year.

I for one would like to get in on that. My half acre piece of heaven has a small (1,500 square foot) brick home on it and it doesn’t seem reasonable my property would rise so quickly in value. Although the property tax division of the Department of Revenue has established procedures to determine the market value of personal property, you have to wonder what those procedures are and if they are being followed. How can we find this out?

I don’t know that we could really know this. With a little bit of digging and asking we can know what the procedures are for that department. But I think what it comes down to is the honesty of our appraisers. We can hope that the appraisers are doing their job in their appraising our property fairly so we will pay a fair tax. We can hope that the tax commissioner will keep tabs on his department so all appraisers are well trained and follow those procedures.

Going about my research to know what is going on, I found that I need to read the Alabama Personal Property Appraisal Manual, if I wanted to know how my house is appraised. But that is a bit unrealistic. What I really need to do is pay for my own appraisal from a reputable company and then compare values to see if my property was appraised correctly. How else could we really know the fair market value of our property? If there was a big difference between the appraisals, I could file an appeal with the Department of Revenue.

So the next time we get our property appraisals for the tax collections due at the end of the year, let’s hope they are accurate and fair. Let’s hope our state government is doing their job because we wouldn’t want to be paying more than our fair share of taxes. That would be unthinkable.

Loxley resident Valerie J. Steimle is the author of two books, “Home Is Where The Heart Is, A look at strengthening the American Family,” and her latest book, “Home Is Where The Learning Is” (www.amazon.com/gp/product/1403379637). Contact her at valeriesteimle@yahoo.com or visit her website at www.stengthenyourhome.com.