Or the streets that feed my development....
Montereau Retirement Community gets stay in tax caseRead more from this Tulsa World article at
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20120519_16_A15_CUTLIN943739http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20120519_16_A15_CUTLIN943739By KEVIN CANFIELD World Staff Writer
Published: 5/19/2012 2:14 AM
Last Modified: 5/19/2012 4:48 AM
A Tulsa County judge this week agreed to consider the Montereau Retirement Community's request that the Assessor's Office be directed to exempt the nonprofit entity from taxation.
District Judge Mary Fitzgerald issued an emergency stay in all administrative appeals in the case Thursday and scheduled oral arguments for June 5.
Attorney Joel Wohlgemuth requested the stay on behalf of his clients, Montereau Inc. and the William K. Warren Medical Research Center, which owns the land.
In his petition, Wohlgemuth states that Tulsa County Assessor Ken Yazel has recognized Montereau's exemption as a licensed continuum of care retirement center since it was granted in 2001.
"However, this year the Assessor placed the property on the assessment roll based on his apparently new belief that the CCRC (continuum of care retirement center) Exemption Statute, which he has consistently applied for years, is now unconstitutional," the petition states.
After being notified in February that the property had been assessed a taxable value of $178,990,012, representatives of Montereau met with the Assessor's Office for an informal hearing to challenge the assessment.
On May 14, the Assessor's Office sent a letter to Montereau stating that the taxable value of the property had been lowered to $107,394,007.
The estimated property taxes due on a property of that value is $1.5 million based on last year's millage rate, according to the Assessor's Office.
Montereau - and all property owners who go through the informal protest process - can appeal the Assessor's Office's decision to the Tulsa County Equalization Board.
But in his petition for a stay, Wohlgemuth argues that only the court has the authority to address the core issue in question: whether the assessor "has a duty to exempt property pursuant to Oklahoma statute regardless of his personal view of the statute's constitutionality."
Montereau is not the first nonprofit entity to challenge Yazel's interpretation of the continuum of care retirement center exemption.
In April, an attorney for Baptist Village Retirement Centers accused Yazel of "attacking sick, elderly people" after that entity received an assessment on its Owasso facility - the first time that had happened.
As he did in April, Yazel this week asserted that the county's licensed continuum of care facilities, including Montereau and Baptist Village, were among approximately 2,500 tax-exempt properties whose classifications were re-examined this year as part of the Assessor's Office's legally mandated duties.
Other licensed continuum of care facilities whose nonexempt status also was being reviewed were Franciscan Villa, St. Simeon's Episcopal Home, the Tulsa Jewish Retirement Community and Health Care Center, and the Villages at Southern Hills.
Yazel said his office must determine whether each property in Montereau is properly classified as a continuum of care facility that can be exempt from property taxes when operated by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and meeting other criteria in law or whether it should receive another classification.
Those structures not deemed to be exempt continue to be taxable and are assessed accordingly, he said.
"First of all, they have much more out there than they are licensed for," Yazel said. "You can be exempted for various reasons, (but) that doesn't apply to building a village out there, which is seemingly what they have done.
"They have all kinds of amenities - they have valet parking, a restaurant, an eight-story apartment building - and if you take that value, which is very conservative, and divide it by the number of licensed beds, that's more than $1 million per licensed bed."
Original Print Headline: Montereau gets stay in tax case
Ken Yazel has guts!"You can be exempted for various reasons, (but) that doesn't apply to building a village out there, which is seemingly what they have done."