Northwest Florida residents are suing property appraisers in three counties because they want to know now whether the oil spill in the Gulf has devalued their properties.

For property appraisers and those attempting to calculate the economic cost of the spill, the owners are asking for too much, too soon.

“I think it’s totally unreasonable,” said Okaloosa County Property Appraiser Timothy “Pete” Smith, one of the appraisers named in the suit. “We don’t have enough data to make any decisions at this time.”

Appraisers in Franklin, Bay and Okaloosa Counties, and the head of the Florida Department of Revenue, have been targeted in a class-action lawsuit by property owners frustrated that they won’t know the effect of the oil spill on their property for months and could be in for higher property taxes.

The suit, filed Wednesday in Leon County Judicial Circuit by two married couples and two individual property owners, seeks immediate confirmation that their property values will go down because of the spill, and assurance that they will take those lowered values into consideration come assessment time, instead of assessments made before the spill.

The suit names Franklin County Tax Appraiser Doris Pendleton, Okaloosa County Appraiser Timothy “Pete” Smith, Bay County Tax Appraiser Dan Sowell and Lisa Echeverri, executive director of the state Department of Revenue.

As owners of property within 5,000 feet of Gulf, Atlantic or bay or estuary shoreline, the property owners are claiming their property values fell because of tar balls and other forms of oil goo landing on public beaches and in bays and estuaries in Northwest Florida -- and the mere threat of oil landing south of the Pandhandle. Damage done to the aquatic environments is also harmful to values, the suit asserts.

“The … oil spill and related pollutant infiltrations and threatened infiltrations have substantially caused, and will continue to cause a diminution in the ’just valuation’ of the coastal residential  property,” said the suit, filed by a number of attorneys in Florida and Texas.

One couple pursuing the suit owns Gulf-front property in Franklin County. Another owns property within 500 feet of the Gulf and 300 feet of the Apalachicola Bay in the county. One plaintiff owns a property adjacent to Gulf shoreline and a property adjacent to the Cinco Bayou in Okaloosa County, and another owns property adjacent to the Gulf in Bay County.

Smith, the Okaloosa County appraiser named in the suit, said that the county does not have the home sales data it needs to complete the assessment property owners want, and it won’t get it for a while. This means it can't fill the owners' requests, he said.

“We’ll probably file a motion to dismiss,” he said.

Members of the governor-appointed team charged with calculating spill-related economic losses in Florida agreed Thursday they will have no idea of the spill’s major impacts on state and local revenue and property values for months.

The state has to stick with established timelines for assessing taxes on Jan.1, said Department of Revenue head Echeverri Thursday at a Tallahassee meeting of the Economic Impact Assessment Working Group section of Gov. Charlie Crist’s Gulf Oil Spill Economic Recovery Task Force.

Property taxes account for 38 percent of the state’s school funding, said Christian Weiss, the governor’s chief economist. Twenty-seven percent of county government revenues and 37 percent of Escambia County’s revenue come from those taxes.

Greg Brown, Santa Rosa County property appraiser, said that lawsuits like the one filed Wednesday can be disastrous for counties that will now have to spend time and unbudgeted money investing in their legal responses. And complaints to counties are going to continue, he said.

“Citizens that are impacted by the negative decline in value due to the oil spill are going to come into all the property appraisers’ offices in Northwest Florida,” come assessment time, Brown said to the working group, “and hold up their notices and say, ‘ Don’t you know what’s going on out there? Have you lost your mind?’”

Brown said a good way to stave off suits would be to offer rebates or other forms of tax relief for property owners approved in a special session. Crist called for a special session Thursday afternoon, shortly after the meeting, but he said it would only concentrate on advancing a constitutional ban on oil drilling in state waters.

Reach Alex Tiegen at 561-329-5389 or atiegen@sunshinestatenews.com