Chelan County's property tax assessments are profoundly broken.

Britini noticed this pattern through her daily work. As a real estate professional and home appraiser, she sees what high-end Chelan County homes are actually selling for. Then she sees what those same homes are assessed at on the tax rolls. The numbers don't match — and they don't match by a lot.

When you look at the data, our current assessment system is completely upside down.

Why this happens

Mass appraisal methods can struggle at the high end of the market. Luxury properties are unique, comparable sales are sparse, and there's no built-in incentive for the office to revisit them after a low number ships. Without rigorous, public audits, the gap compounds.

Why it matters even if you don't own a luxury home

Property tax bills are zero-sum across the levy. When one parcel pays less than its fair share, every other parcel — yours included — pays more. The undervaluation of luxury second homes isn't a quiet bookkeeping problem; it's a quiet transfer from working families to absentee owners. See Issue 03 →

This is the second half of the inverted system. The same mass-appraisal pipeline that lets luxury parcels drift below market also pushes affordable homes above it. Lower-priced parcels are easier to model — there are more of them and the comparable sales are dense — so the office's number tends to land tight against the upper edge of the market.

For a homeowner, that means the appraised value the county uses for taxes is often higher than what their home would actually fetch if they listed it tomorrow. That's not how a fair tax system should work.

The fix isn't lower taxes — it's accurate ones

Britini is not advocating for cuts to county services. The roads, fire districts, and schools funded by property taxes deserve real dollars. The point is that those dollars should be apportioned correctly. Working-class homes that are over-assessed need to come down. Luxury homes that are under-assessed need to come up. The total bill the county collects doesn't have to change at all.

This is how property tax works in Washington: the county sets a budget, then divides it across the assessed value of every parcel in the levy. If $100 million needs to come out of $20 billion of total assessed value, every parcel pays the same rate against its assessment.

Now imagine a luxury parcel that should be assessed at $5 million is assessed at $3 million instead. That's $2 million missing from the denominator. The total $100 million still needs to be collected — so the rate goes up slightly, and every other homeowner pays a little more. Multiply that by every undervalued luxury parcel in the county, and the difference adds up to real money out of working-family budgets.

When luxury second homes don't pay their fair share, the burden doesn't disappear. It shifts.

Who feels it most

• Seniors on fixed incomes whose tax bill grows faster than their savings
• First-time homebuyers facing higher monthly payments before they even close
• Working families whose budget can't absorb a 5% jump in assessed value
• Renters whose landlords pass through every cost

Property tax shows up everywhere a family spends money on housing. It's escrowed into a mortgage payment. It's built into a landlord's rent calculation. It compounds against insurance premiums and ownership costs. When the assessment is wrong, every one of those numbers is wrong too — and they all push the same direction: less affordable.

Chelan County is one of the most beautiful places in Washington. It's also a place where local families are increasingly priced out of the neighborhoods their grandparents built. The assessor's office can't solve the housing crisis on its own, but it can stop making it worse — and that starts with making sure every property pays the share it actually owes.

The throughline

Issues 01 through 04 aren't four separate problems. They're one problem with four faces: an inverted assessment system that lets the wealthy underpay and forces working families to make up the difference, with downstream effects on housing affordability for everyone.

Britini is running because she sees this pattern in the data every day. Read more about why →

Here's how it happens. The county uses a property-type code to flag what's on a parcel. For a developed home, the code says SINGLE FAMILY UNITS. For a vacant lot, the code often says the same thing — even when the improvement value is zero, meaning the county itself doesn't believe a structure is there.

We confirmed this with the assessor's own data. About 3,500 parcels coded as residential single-family had improvement values under $1,000. That's not 3,500 cases the office could have caught; it's 3,500 cases the office already has the data to catch, sitting in its own systems.

Why we're flagging it here

This issue isn't as dramatic as the luxury-vs-affordable inversion, but it tells the same story: the assessment process doesn't have enough public, rigorous, data-driven checks. Without them, errors persist. With them, errors get fixed. See commitment #4 →