There is so much incompetence and political game playing regarding property taxes. I work in commercial real estate development. We negotiated a TIF district in a small midwestern town to help redevelop their vacant mall. In theory, if we could redevelop the mall and fill it with new stores, the sales taxes and property taxes from this growth would greatly benefit the city over the long term and help finance this risky project.
First we came into battle with the school district. They would not allow us to build apartments on the mall site because "renters don't contribute to property taxes for the school", even though the citizens of this town need rentals because not everyone can afford a home. It then came to light that the city had been paying the school district out of their operating budget... which is illegal, schools can only be funded by property taxes. But would any politician want to go to war with the school district because they had accidentally been paying them illegally with taxpayer dollars? No way, they'd be voted out for attacking schools. So the school district continues draining the operating budget from the city to this day, while also getting their share of property taxes.
Enter the county assessor. We went back through all the assessment records and discovered that the county assessor had not re-assessed the commercial properties in the area for 8 years... meanwhile jacking taxes up on single family homes annually. Essentially they were giving businesses a freeze on property taxes while shifting the burden onto homeowners. If the county wasn't reassessing commercial real estate, than our TIF development couldn't demonstrate growth as the taxes would not change! So we tried to shake the hornets nest and let the county and city know that their taxpayers were being taken advantage of...
What was the end result? Why had they not been reassessing commercial properties? Incompetence, the assessor was some idiot who was voted in because he had the "D" next to his name and did not know anything about assessing property taxes and argued that he was simply "too understaffed" to assess commercial properties for the last 10 years.
Now imagine a whole country where massive, expensive errors like this can play out without anyone noticing for nearly a decade... it's frightening how broken, corrupt, or incompetent our government is in the United States.
In theory, decentralized government delegating various decisions closer to the people allows for more oversight and flexibility. In practice, in most places the oversight doesn't happen and just results in local politicians doing what they want, and simply enforcing a one-size-fits-all rule of law would be an improvement.
Sorry this was annoying and messy for you, but I look at many other countries and on balance this doesn't sound too bad, and certainly not "broken or incompetent" as if the US was on the verge of collapse because of things like this.
If anything, this sounds like a system working, and you doing a bit of whining. Yeah, there's political game playing, that's called the price of localism and democracy.
A city breaking the law for decades by paying the school district illegally and no one doing anything about it out of fear of getting bad PR for their election campaign... or mishandling property assessments for 8 years are all pretty huge examples of incompetence and are not something I expect in a first world country.
It's the exact opposite of the system working. It's people being given power because of their party rather than their qualification and it indicates a greater sickness in politics in which we have become binary sports fans rooting for our team no matter the cost or quality of the candidate.
To be fair I have no clue how broken property taxes are in Europe or Japan or other first world places, but this ordeal was eye opening to me having grown up assuming our local governments were held to a higher standard.
First we came into battle with the school district. They would not allow us to build apartments on the mall site because "renters don't contribute to property taxes for the school", even though the citizens of this town need rentals because not everyone can afford a home. It then came to light that the city had been paying the school district out of their operating budget... which is illegal, schools can only be funded by property taxes. But would any politician want to go to war with the school district because they had accidentally been paying them illegally with taxpayer dollars? No way, they'd be voted out for attacking schools. So the school district continues draining the operating budget from the city to this day, while also getting their share of property taxes.
Enter the county assessor. We went back through all the assessment records and discovered that the county assessor had not re-assessed the commercial properties in the area for 8 years... meanwhile jacking taxes up on single family homes annually. Essentially they were giving businesses a freeze on property taxes while shifting the burden onto homeowners. If the county wasn't reassessing commercial real estate, than our TIF development couldn't demonstrate growth as the taxes would not change! So we tried to shake the hornets nest and let the county and city know that their taxpayers were being taken advantage of...
What was the end result? Why had they not been reassessing commercial properties? Incompetence, the assessor was some idiot who was voted in because he had the "D" next to his name and did not know anything about assessing property taxes and argued that he was simply "too understaffed" to assess commercial properties for the last 10 years.
Now imagine a whole country where massive, expensive errors like this can play out without anyone noticing for nearly a decade... it's frightening how broken, corrupt, or incompetent our government is in the United States.