AUGUSTA — Rockland City Assessor Dennis Reed, representatives for Walmart, and attorneys for both sides will meet in Room 300, Office of the Clerk of the House, in Augusta, Friday, May 15. There, Walmart will appeal Rockland’s refusal to decrease its April 2013 tax assessment of its former property on Camden Street, across from Home Depot. The property is now leased to Ocean State Job Lots.

Walmart is asking that the tax assessment for that year be equivalent to the sale price of the empty building purchased by Ocean State. 

Assessments for the properties are based on the land and the buildings, and the personal property, which includes the fixtures, but not inventory. Walmart did not close the Rockland store until October 2013.

By the time of the sale to Ocean State in December of that year, “The shelving was all gone, registers, phones, security cameras — all of that was gone. It was just a stripped shell of a building,” Reed said in his office during an interview.

“They sold the property in December 2013 to Ocean State Job Lot for $3,125,000,” he said. “It was assessed [in April] at roughly $8,400,000.”

Walmart is requesting a refund of the difference between the assessments done in April 2013 when Walmart was still in operation and December 2013 when the property was left stripped and vacant.

“The sale to Ocean State was based on just a shell,” he said. “Not a going concern, which Walmart was in April 2013.”

Walmart had a sale agreement by the end of April 2013, according to Reed, but “that does not hold as a sale until the final documents are closed.”

In early 2014, Walmart made its initial tax decrease request, based on the April 2013 - April 2014 assessment.

Reed denied the request, “because they didn’t furnish all the information that I would want in order to make a justified assessment.”

According to Reed, the usual steps of appeal start at the city level, go to Superior Court, then to the Supreme Court of Maine. But organizations with more than $1 million in assessed value have the option to appeal to the state instead.

Walmart’s tax assessment had remained steady through the years it was in Rockland.

“In 2009, they had a permit for $800,000 for improvements to the property,” said Reed. “And I think the value increased $75,000 of that permit. A lot of it was replacement of bathrooms, cosmetics, the greenhouse and garden area.”

This is the first formal appeal the City of Rockland has received from Walmart.