If your Malibu home was worth $ 1 million in the last fiscal year it’s a reasonable prediction that you’re $94,000 richer today, at least on paper, than you were the year before, according to a recently released study by the L.A. County Assessor.
County Assessor Rick Auerbach said that the value of real estate in Malibu went up 9.4 percent in the 1999-2000 fiscal year, and though Malibu was ranked high ( 7th in the county), the city was not at the top of the charts. That distinction, perhaps surprisingly, went to El Segundo, which held the lead in a booming South Bay area. The top 10 value gainers in fiscal 1999-2000 were;
- El Segundo +13.1 percent
- Carson +11.5
- Redondo Beach +10.9
- Hidden Hills +10.5
- Rolling Hills Estates +10.1
- Manhattan Beach +9.8
- Malibu +9.4
- West Hollywood +9.0
- Sante Fe Springs +9.0
- Hermosa Beach +8.9
Overall, L.A. County did well, gaining 6.7 percent in the value of its real estate, which converts, in dollars, to an assessment roll that 37 billion dollars higher than the year before .
We asked our new City Manager Marilyn Leuck, who has a heavy background in finance, what this means to the City of Malibu. She said that Bill Thomas, Malibu’s former administrative services director, had previously anticipated a raise in property tax revenues that were apparently right on target and probably were based on projections from the Assessor’s office. In actual dollars, the city received $2.4 million in property tax revenue for the 1999-2000 fiscal year, which ended at the end of June, 2000. Next year they anticipate the revenue from property taxes will actually be about $2.670 million, a gain of about $270,000, which is an increase of roughly 9.7 percent.
What the city receives from real estate property taxes was determined in 1978 when Prop. 13 passed and froze property taxes, putting a 2 percent annual cap on individual pieces of property. But Prop. 13 did a few other things, and, according to Leuck, it has created some inequities between cities. The older cities, like Ventura, actually receive about 16 cents of every property tax dollar. Smaller, newer cities, like Malibu, get only 3-4 cents out of every property tax dollar, which, when converted to dollars, means Malibu, if it were being treated like the city of Ventura, might be receiving another $7 million or so in property tax revenue. Because Prop. 13 has been treated as sacrosanct, that inequity has never been corrected.
According to the Assessor, Malibu has 6,149 single-family residences, 210 residential income parcels (which means apartments) and 382 commercial/industrial parcels. Overall, when added up, Malibu jumps from an assessed value of $4.1 billion to a new valuation of $4.5 billion, an increase of $390 million.