MORGANTOWN — The Monongalia County Commission has a series of meetings coming up in which it hopes to finalize the repayment of just over $3 million in taxes, plus interest, paid by the developers of University Park at Evansdale and West Virginia Campus Housing dating back to 2015.
One of the issues the county has been trying to work out is who will pay the interest on the collected taxes, which is building at a rate in excess of $550 a day.
The West Virginia Supreme Court ruled in November that the proper valuation for the $90 million public/private development on WVU’s Evansdale campus was zero, not the $9 million assessed by the county in 2015.
The ruling also provided precedent for the subsequent tax years as well as legal challenges from West Virginia Campus Housing, resulting in the county opting against additional litigation.
Because the properties were being assessed pending a legal determination, the taxes were collected and, per the state, had to be distributed to a number of taxing entities including the state, the county, the Monongalia County Board of Education (BOE), the BOE excess levy, the BOE bond levy, the City of Morgantown and, starting in 2016, excess levies tied to public transportation, volunteer fire departments, recreation and libraries.
Those funds were distributed with the warning that the money may have to be returned based on the legal ruling.
County Commissioner Sean Sikora said the county has a tentative agreement with attorneys for the developers that interest could be cut off on 12/31 with the understanding that the commission would approve repayment of the funds at its Jan. 9 regular meeting.
Based on that agreement, the anticipated total to be repaid is $3,023,671.55, of which $219,665.68 is interest. The county is still waiting on a court order that will finalize those numbers.
The largest refunds will come from the BOE and BOE excess levy, followed by the city and the county.
“We’re moving forward with the assumption that the interest will be cut off on 12/31 and we’re going to make a payment on the 9th,” Sikora said, explaining that the county plans to meet this week with some of the affected entities regarding the interest payments.
He said there are a number of options that have been explored, including having the county pick up half of the interest owed by each of the entities.
“That was one of the things we discussed. That we would anticipate, as a measure of good faith, picking up half the interest that everybody would be responsible for. But again, we haven’t finalized that,” Sikora said, noting that while the county had no choice in distributing the taxes once collected, it did make the choice to move forward with the initial litigation.
“We’re taking responsibility for it. The buck stops here in regard to allowing the assessor to move forward with the litigation, but this was something that was kind of forced on them,” he said of the other taxing entities.
“The state forced us, in that we had to collect. We couldn’t tell [Sheriff] Perry [Palmer] not to do his job. So we collected, and the state said, ‘Yes, you’ve got to distribute them.’ So this was all really uncharted territory. It is what it is, and there wasn’t a simple solution.”
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