Language in the state’s new budget bill might squash Porter County Assessor John Scott’s effort to increase the assessment on Arcelor Mittal’s Burns Harbor steel plant.

Scott last fall appealed the state’s assessment of Mittal, contending that the $126 million value set for the steel mill’s land and buildings should actually be $325 million.

But Scott said his appeal might now be in jeopardy, due to language added to the state’s new budget bill, H.B. 1001, in the most recent special session.

The new law requires county assessors who want to appeal industrial values set by the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance to first get a written estimate of the cost of the appeal and to secure county council approval for the necessary funding. Further, the assessor must substantiate the value sought as part of the appeal petition or else risk having the appeal dismissed at the outset and blocked from any further appeals.

The new law also gives the Indiana Board of Tax Review the authority to decide if the assessor has a reasonable likelihood of success; if not, the case ends and cannot be appealed again.

In addition, the law blocks Mittal’s base assessment from exceeding the value as set on March 1, 2006, which directly affects the county’s pending appeals from 2007 and ’08.

“You talk about a dictatorship,” Scott said late last week. “It makes it almost impossible for me to appeal it.”

A higher assessment of a large facility like Mittal Steel would boost the overall assessed value, in turn helping to cut the tax rates for all taxpayers. In short, if Mittal were assessed at the level Scott says it should be, the steel mill would pay more in property taxes, but the local tax rates Ð mainly for property owners in the Burns Harbor, Duneland Schools, Westchester Public Library and the county districts --- could be lowered as a result.

“I think the people in Chesterton should be mad as hell,” Scott said of the new state restrictions.

Scott’s appeal of the Mittal plant has its roots in an agreement approved in 2007 by the Porter County Property Tax

Assessment Board of Appeals, which agreed to accept a $126 million assessment for the steel mill’s real property in exchange for Mittal agreeing to abandon all of its pending tax appeals.

At the time, the agreement was described as a way to end the long-standing disputes between the steel maker and the county over the plant’s assessed values, while also saving the county from possibly having to issue a refund of about $7 million if Mittal’s tax appeals were successful. For a number of years, the steel mill had been taxed on an assessed value of about $300 million, but it regularly appealed those values.

Since the time of that 2007 agreement, the DLGF -- not the county Ð now handles the assessments for Mittal Steel just as it does for other area steel mills.

Scott said the $126 million assessment is based on the state’s decision to set the plant’s value at $19,000 an acre, without differentiating between useable and unusable property. He contends that the actual value should be around $80,000 an acre.

Scott said he isn’t giving up entirely on his appeal but plans to consult with county officials and attorney Marilyn Meighen, which has been handling the Mittal appeals.