If you’re a renter, you can be forgiven for not knowing what the property assessor does. Here’s how it works: The county commission sets the tax rate per $100 in property value. Then the assessor assigns a value to every piece of property in the county. (All told, it’s 385,000 properties.) The more the assessor says your property is worth, the more you pay in property taxes. The primaries for Shelby County Property Assessor are heated because the last time the property assessor completed a major reassessment was January 1, 2009, just after the housing market collapsed, and a lot of people thought that, given the market at the time, their 2009 assessment was too high.
