Webster County residents received their annual property tax valuations this week, and residents brought concerns and questions to the Board of Supervisors during a tax levy special meeting Tuesday.

“When I first started paying taxes in Fort Dodge, I think I was paying $800 a year,” said Fort Dodge resident Shirley Trent. “Now it’s over twice as much. That’s a heck of a lot for someone that’s retired and living on a retirement income.”

“I own a storage business,” said Ly Tran, of Fort Dodge. “On one property alone, you guys have raised my property tax in 2025 by 40 percent. It went from $40,000 to $65,000, so just paying property taxes and sales taxes alone is literally like $120,000. How can a commercial business survive with $60,000 to $70,000 in property taxes? It’s literally more than double of all my apartments and my houses combined.”

“Our property values when I got online this morning from 2021-2026, the assessed value of our home went up 57.5 percent,” said Daphne Wilwerth, of Vincent. “When I Google, with the normal appreciation rates for real estate in Iowa, it’s 5.5 percent for the last 10 years and 3.6 percent since 2020. I’m expressing concerns that I think a lot of us have, and I don’t understand how your assessed value can go up that much and you get taxed on that, but yet you’re not ever going to sell it for that. Who do we hold accountable?”

According to Webster County Budget and Finance Director Krystal Lloyd, county rates for 2026 have decreased for residential property owners with the rate for urban tax payers decreasing by 2.37 percent and decreasing for rural tax payers by 1.76 percent.

Commercial is increasing slightly, according to Lloyd, by 4.97 percent for urban areas and 5.62 percent for rural areas.

“The assessment process and the tax levy process are two very different processes,” said Webster County Supervisor Niki Conrad. “It’s not to us to assign blame one place or another. The assessment is what the value of your land with the value of what your home is worth. The assessed value is what the professionals think your house is worth in today’s market, and what it could sell for if I chose to sell it today. The people at Vanguard, the people in the Assessor’s Office, go out, they look at my house and say ‘yeah, she put a new roof on it,’ so it’s going to be assessed more. If I think my house is actually worth less than that, I can go to the Assessor’s Office and ask Angie to look at it. She has the ability to lower it.’ If she doesn’t, then I have an opportunity to go to the Board of Review, and I have to give them proof because of this and that and show them that my roof is nice, but maybe my basement isn’t. From there, we still have the opportunity to appeal. The Webster County Assessor’s Office has to give the full Webster County assessments to the state. They have to say this is what Webster County assessments are worth, and then the state can say ‘we think you’re off base. We think you’re wrong, and we are going to put a flat rate on everything instead of trusting the people who live and work here to say Niki’s house is worth this much, Daphne’s house is worth this much, Jamie’s house is worth this much. They could then say, forget that, everybody’s house is going up 25 percent. Is that fair to me? No, but they have the right to do that, so the Assessor’s Office is trying as hard as they possibly can to make things as fair as humanly possible. Does it stink when your house goes up 56 percent, sure it does.”

According to Conrad, Supervisor Austin Hayek has been working closely with Lloyd on all county budgets to be fair to employees and citizens while also working hard to lower the levy, which is a percentage of your assessed value, even when assessed values go up.

“We don’t want our property taxes to go up either,” said Conrad. “There is legislation that has happened over the past five years that limits our ability to grow. There’s three bills currently in the state legislature that are also going to again limit our ability to grow. I’ll place a little blame on this state legislature, but they’re doing what they can because they’re hearing from people just like we’re hearing from people that property taxes are too high, so everyone involved is trying to make things better. We’re doing the best that we can, but what we’re talking about today is the levy. I’m very proud of the work that Krystal has done this year. I know Austin (Hayek) worked very closely with Krystal to make sure that our percentage, our levy, went down this year, particularly for residential. We’re proud of that. It’s super frustrating when your assessment goes up, so it feels like your taxes do go up. I wanted to make sure to explain the assessment process versus the levy process.”