Ireland v. Town of Wethersfield

• Decision Date: 19 August 1997
• Docket Number: No. 15482,15482
• Citation: 698 A.2d 888,242 Conn. 550
• Court: Connecticut Supreme Court
• Parties: Philip IRELAND v. TOWN OF WETHERSFIELD.

Page 888

698 A.2d 888

242 Conn. 550

Philip IRELAND v. TOWN OF WETHERSFIELD.

No. 15482.

Supreme Court of Connecticut.

Argued April 29, 1997.

Decided Aug. 19, 1997.

Kerry R. Callahan, with whom, on the brief, was Karen Keefe Clark, Hartford, for appellant (defendant).

Robert W. Heagney, East Hartford, for appellee (plaintiff).

Before BORDEN, BERDON, PALMER, McDONALD and PETERS, JJ.

PETERS, Associate Justice.

The principal issue in this appeal is whether, in a taxpayer suit brought pursuant to General Statutes § 12-117a, ¹ a respondent town has a burden of introducing evidence to establish that the town's assessment of the taxpayer's property did not result in an unjust tax. In order to contest the assessed valuation of property that the plaintiff, Philip Ireland, ² owned in the defendant town of Wethersfield (town), he appealed his assessment first to the board of tax appeal of the town and thereafter to the trial court. The trial court, Aronson, J., partially corrected the assessment of the plaintiff's property but denied him any further relief. Upon the plaintiff's further appeal to the Appellate Court, that court reversed the judgment of the trial court and remanded the case for a new trial. Ireland v. Wethersfield, 41 Conn.App. 421, 430, 676 A.2d 422 (1996). We granted the town's petition for certification to appeal and now reverse the judgment of the Appellate Court.

A joint stipulation of facts provides much of the largely undisputed factual basis for this appeal. As the result of a decennial revaluation of real estate that the town was required to undertake pursuant to General Statutes § 12-62, the town determined that, as of October 1, 1989, the plaintiff's property had a fair market value of $906,000. At that time, the plaintiff owned approximately eight acres of land on Old Reservoir Road and Whippoorwill Way, with respect to which he, in 1980, had obtained the necessary planning, zoning and inland wetlands approvals for a twelve lot subdivision. Immediately after having received these approvals, the plaintiff made substantial improvements to the property in conformity therewith, but he had discontinued such efforts in 1982. Between January, 1982, and September, 1990, the town's wetlands commission amended its regulations and maps.

In September, 1990, subsequent to the date of the tax assessment, the plaintiff sought building permits for the subdivision from the town's building inspector. These permits were denied on the ground that the plaintiff's 1980 wetlands permit had expired. The plaintiff successfully challenged the validity of this administrative ruling in a separate court action, in which the trial court, Maloney, J., concluded, in 1993, that the permit issued to the plaintiff in 1980 had continued throughout in full force and effect. ³

In arriving at a valuation of the plaintiff's property as of October 1, 1989, the town assessor (assessor) determined that the highest and best use of the property was as a residential subdivision consisting of twelve lots. In accordance with General Statutes § 12-62a (b), the assessor assessed each lot in the plaintiff's subdivision at 70 percent of its fair market value. Because improvements to the subdivision had not yet been completed as of the date of the revaluation, the assessor adjusted downward by 50 percent the fair market value of ten of the lots, to arrive at a total fair market value of $906,000. On direct examination during the presentation of the town's case before the trial court, Aronson, J., the assessor conceded that he mistakenly had failed to recognize that deed restrictions required a similar downward adjustment of market value with respect to the remaining two lots. As a result, he acknowledged that the fair market value of the plaintiff's property as of October 1, 1989, should be reduced further from $906,000 to $769,000.

In his challenge to the town's assessment, the plaintiff took issue with the assessor's conclusion that, as of October 1, 1989, the plaintiff's property was to be valued as a residential subdivision. He claimed that the subdivision was not then a viable project because, on various occasions between September, 1990, and May, 1991, town officials had informed him that his wetlands permit had expired and that his subdivision approval, therefore, had lapsed. Accordingly, the plaintiff offered the testimony of an expert appraiser who stated that, in his opinion, the highest and best use of the plaintiff's property was for recreational use and that the property should, therefore, have been valued, as of October 1, 1989, at $206,000. To arrive at this figure, the appraiser selected three allegedly comparable pieces of property as evidence that the plaintiff's property had a fair market price of $25,000 per acre.

The trial court rejected the evidence of valuation offered by the plaintiff. For two independent reasons, it found the testimony of the plaintiff's expert appraiser to be unpersuasive. First, it found that, because the plaintiff neither had requested nor been refused a subdivision permit until eleven months after the date of the assessment, as of that date the highest and best use of the plaintiff's property was as a residential subdivision rather than as recreational land. ⁴ As the court also observed, it has now been determined judicially that the plaintiff's wetlands permit was still fully in effect as of the date of the assessment. Second, even if the plaintiff's appraiser properly had determined recreational use to be the best use of the plaintiff's property, the court found that the plaintiff had not established a proper valuation because there was an insufficient relationship between the plaintiff's property and the properties selected by the appraiser as comparables.

On the basis of these findings, the trial court concluded that the "plaintiff ha[d] failed to sustain his burden of proving that the assessor's valuation of his land as of October 1, 1989 was not its true and actual value." In response to the plaintiff's motion for clarification of its decision, the court found that the "true and actual value of the property on October 1, 1989 should be $769,000," rather than the originally stated value of $906,000.

On appeal, the Appellate Court reversed the judgment of the trial court and remanded the case for a new trial. Ireland v. Wethersfield, supra, 41 Conn.App. at 430, 676 A.2d 422. It upheld the decision of the trial court rejecting the expert opinion proffered by the plaintiff's appraiser. Id. at 428-29, 676 A.2d 422. It expressed no reservations about the validity of the trial court's conclusion that the plaintiff had failed to sustain his burden of proving that the assessor's reduced valuation of the plaintiff's property was not its true and actual value. It held, nonetheless, that the plaintiff was entitled to a new trial because, in its view, the town had failed to provide sufficient evidence to permit the trial court to make a finding whether the town's reduced assessment valuation represented the true and actual value of the plaintiff's property. Id. at 429, 676 A.2d 422.

In granting the town's petition for certification for appeal from the judgment of the Appellate Court, we framed the issue as follows: "Under the circumstances of this case, did the Appellate Court properly conclude that a new trial was required because of the absence of evidence of whether the assessment by the town would result in an unjust tax?" Ireland v. Wethersfield, 238 Conn. 903, 677 A.2d 1375 (1996). In order to address this issue, we must first clarify the nature of the burden, if any, that falls upon a town to justify a tax assessment that a taxpayer has challenged, pursuant to § 12-117a, as excessive. In light of that clarification, we then must decide whether the town is entitled to judgment in this case. We conclude that it is so entitled.

In Xerox Corp. v. Board of Tax Review, 240 Conn. 192, 690 A.2d 389 (1997), we recently restated the basic principles of the law governing a tax appeal pursuant to § 12-117a. We observed that, in such an appeal, "the trial court tries the matter de novo and the ultimate question is the ascertainment of the true and actual value of the [taxpayer's] property.... At the de novo proceeding, the taxpayer bears the burden of establishing that the assessor has overassessed its property.... The trier of fact must arrive at his own conclusions as to the value of [the taxpayer's property] by weighing the opinion of the appraisers, the claims of the parties in light of all the circumstances in evidence bearing on value, and his own general knowledge of the elements going to establish value." (Citations omitted; internal quotation marks omitted.) Id. at 204, 690 A.2d 389. In restating these principles, we relied on cases such as Newbury Commons Ltd. Partnership v. Stamford, 226 Conn. 92, 104, 626 A.2d 1292 (1993); Stamford Apartments Co. v. Stamford, 203 Conn. 586, 590, 525 A.2d 1327 (1987); O'Brien v. Board of Tax Review, 169 Conn. 129, 130-31, 136, 362 A.2d 914 (1975); New Haven Water Co. v. Board of Tax Review, 166 Conn. 232, 234, 348 A.2d 641 (1974); Burritt Mutual Savings Bank v. New Britain, 146 Conn. 669, 675, 154 A.2d 608 (1959).

In Xerox Corp., we had no occasion to consider the extent to which our summation was a blend of two disparate lines of tax appeal cases. In all these cases, the trial court hears the tax appeal de novo on the premise that, throughout, it is the taxpayer who bears the burden of establishing an overassessment and of persuading the trial court of the true and actual value of his property for assessment purposes. New Haven Water Co. v. Board of Tax Review, supra, 166 Conn. at 234, 348 A.2d 641. ⁵ The cases on establishing a true and actual value differ, however, depending on whether the taxpayer has met his initial burden of establishing that his tax assessment was excessive.

If the trial court finds that the taxpayer has failed to...