Older homeowners of modest means are being dropped from a senior citizen exemption program that provides property tax relief as unexpected median income numbers and qualifying levels don’t correlate to inflation, according to Jefferson County Assessor Jeff Chapman.

The elected official expressed frustration over the situation during a county government coordination meeting held Friday, July 21.

Chapman said his office has been trying to get more seniors onto the exemption program but instead has been “losing folks” as inflationary income increases have caused incomes to breach the qualifying threshold. In effect, those increases have not left them financially better off and, in fact, have harmed them when it comes to property tax exemptions.

The Legislature recently made changes to the program, but Chapman said the adjustments aren’t helping because median income projections by the state’s Office of Financial Management (OMF) have “dramatically changed.” He said he does not know why.

Estimators with the OFM base projections on updated census data, Chapman said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, employment security figures were also factored in, he stated.

The assessor told The Leader that last year, the OFM projected Jefferson County’s median income to be $72,777, but their latest figures put it at $63,641 – almost $10,000 less. He said the updated figures were released after the Legislature passed the bill.

Chapman, who served on an assessors legislative committee, said he supported the bill that modified thresholds for senior exemptions because he thought it would help seniors in Jefferson County.

He said that over the past four or five years, assessors have seen that “the senior citizens exemption threshold was not keeping up with the market” and that “a lot of people were going to fall off the exemption because with Social Security increases alone, they were going to be over the limits.”

“If you take the percentages that we were proposing in the bill, for Jefferson County that would have put the threshold income, instead of $40,000, it would have made it $50,944. In other words, it would add almost $11,000 to that threshold,” he said. “I was fine with that. I looked at it and said, this is fair, because my seniors are really losing. I’m pulling people out of the program because of their inflationary increases.”

He continued, “we’ve got a frozen limit, but we’ve got inflationary increases in median income. They’re not really making any more money. I mean, they’re making more dollars, but they’re also paying a lot more for food.”

Chapman said he is “disappointed” by the development and noted that people who used to qualify have been “waiting patiently for the limits to go up.” He said his office has been telling seniors that the threshold was going up by $11,000, but due to the OFM’s latest numbers, that turned out to not be true.

Information about the exemption and criteria to qualify can be found on the Assessor’s page on the county’s website, co.jefferson.wa.us. Click on “Senior/Disabled exemption.”