I completed my first term on the McCordsville Town Council in December, 2019. But I maintained my interest in several projects. One of them was how to improve the intersection of Mt. Comfort Road and Pendleton Pike and the dual CSX train tracks.
As I was looking over parcels that might need to be acquired to separate the rail from the road, I was going over the CSX parcels in McCordsville.
Railroad real estate is assessed differently from regular commercial and residential real estate. It is assessed by the state and then tax bills are sent by the county treasurer to CSX. CSX always pays its real estate taxes.
Once paid, tax revenue is divvied up amongst various political subdivisions in a complicated process. The result is revenue from each parcel in a political subdivision (usually a city or town) is assigned to a particular beneficiary.
However, I could not follow the revenue from CSX’s parcels in McCordsville to the clerk-treasurer’s office in the Town of McCordsville. I worked with the clerk-treasurer’s of McCordsville and the Hancock County Treasurer’s and Assessor’s offices. The Hancock County Assessor took an interest in finding out the answer and was very helpful.
After several months the Hancock County Assessor was able to determine that the CSX parcels in McCordsville were incorrectly assigned to others for determining tax revenue.
I do not know how long this error has been in place. It likely goes back to McCordsville’s incorporation as a town in Indiana. Nonetheless, it was corrected and the end result is approximately $10,000 MORE TAX REVENUE FOR MCCORDSVILLE EVERY YEAR GOING FORWARD!
Since the population of McCordsville is less than 10,000, that is more than $1 per person every year for a very long time.
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