Walgreens settlement could snowball and leave La Crosse property-tax payers footing bill

Five other big retailers waiting in the wings

The city of La Crosse has more battles ahead with big retailers.

The city is in the process of approving a settlement with Walgreens over a property-tax assessment dispute.

But K-Mart, Sears, Herberger’s, Macy’s and Menards are all waiting in the wings with their own challenges to the city’s assessments of their properties.

“We have an assessment on Macy’s for about $5.7 million,” La Crosse assessor Mark Schlafer said. “They’re contending that it should be worth $2.5 million.”

Schlafer explains how the difference comes to be.

“I would say that their value for assessment purposes should be based on the sales of dark stores,” he said, “which, in essence, are stores that have gone vacant and have sat for awhile and are not in good shape.”

Schlafer added that it is not a fair way to assess property but retailers like Walgreens have been very successful at using the court system to knock millions off assessments, meaning the rest of the property taxpayers pay more.  

“When large properties go down in value, everybody else has to make up the tax,” Schlafer said.

Those fights from big retailers from the city are part of an ugly trend, Schlafer believes.

“It’s my contention,” he said, “and all the other assessors in the United States, it is a wave of really inappropriate, unfair decisions that have been, actually, won by various organizations and courts that followed them along to other states.”

The pending Walgreens settlement would grant a refund of over $80,000 from the city for the last three years. That could start a snowball effect of refund checks from the city for hundreds of thousands of dollars – and higher taxes for everyone else.