Jackson County will elect its assessor now
The whole state voted on a single Jackson County job, and it was not an accident. Behind Amendment 2 sits three years of unlawful assessments, a court fight, and a settlement that could return $250 million to property owners.
Voters in Cape Girardeau helped decide who assesses property in Jackson County on Tuesday. So did voters in Springfield, in St. Joseph, in every county in the state.
That sounds like a mistake. It isn’t. Jackson County was the only charter county in Missouri that appointed the official who sets property values instead of electing one. The exception was written into the state constitution, so removing it required a statewide vote. Amendment 2 passed, and the exception is gone.
The question is why the legislature bothered asking. The answer is three years long.
2023
Jackson County reassessed property, as Missouri law requires in odd-numbered years. Homes that had been undervalued for years came up hard — around 30 percent on average by the coverage of the time, with some owners reporting increases past 100 percent.
Sticker shock alone doesn’t make an assessment unlawful. What followed did.
Then-Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued alongside the State Tax Commission, and the commission issued an order rolling the assessments back — to the prior assessment plus 15 percent, or current levels, whichever was lower. In most cases that meant back to 2021 plus 15.
The findings were about process. Per the attorney general’s office, the county failed to give timely and proper notice of assessments, failed to perform physical inspections state law required, and handled the resulting appeals in a manner the order called illegal and dysfunctional.
A Jackson County judge later ruled the State Tax Commission had the authority to order the rollback. An attempt to override then-County Executive Frank White Jr.’s veto of a local rollback failed.
2026
Two weeks before the election, the county and class-action attorneys announced a settlement. Under it, Jackson County could return as much as $250 million to property owners, most of it as tax credits rather than checks.
Then the state voted to take away the county’s ability to appoint the person who does the assessing.
Read in order, Amendment 2 stops looking like housekeeping. It is the last item in a sequence: assessments found unlawful, a rollback ordered, a rollback resisted, a settlement in nine figures, and a constitutional change removing the county’s discretion over who holds the job.
What is genuinely unsettled
An election requires a date, a filing process, and a decision about who holds the office in the meantime. None of that is resolved in the reporting available as of this writing.
What is unresolved: when the first assessor election occurs, whether it lands on the November 2026 ballot or a later cycle, whether the sitting appointee serves until then, and what the legislature’s implementing language specifies. The amendment also requires assessors to meet training standards set by state law; whether those standards already exist or have to be written is a separate open question. None of it has been announced.
The part worth keeping on the record
Missouri elects its assessors everywhere else, and has for a long time. It is not obvious that electing one produces better assessments than appointing one — an elected assessor faces a different pressure, not an absent one, and it runs toward assessing low in an election year.
What Tuesday settled was narrower than a verdict that electing works better. A county produced assessments the state found unlawful, spent three years litigating them, and agreed to a settlement that may cost a quarter of a billion dollars. The state’s response was to remove the county’s say over who does that job next time.
Whether that fixes anything is a question for the first election. Nobody has scheduled it yet.
Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com. Something we missed? tips.