COVENTRY – Several Chenango County townships have not had a reassessment in more than a decade. Coventry isn’t one of them. The town had a revaluation just three years ago, but last summer the town board adopted a resolution to move to a tri-annual reassessment, which means residents are suffering through the process once again.

Some residents, namely a group calling themselves the Alliance of Coventry Taxpayers, have been asking why.

Jeff Bartholomew, regional director of the New York State Office of Real Property Services, attempted to answer that question in a public meeting recently at the Coventry Fire House. He also detailed what property owners could expect in the final stages of the process, which began in 2008.

The problem is, Bartholomew explained, that the assessed values of property within the township have not “kept pace with the marketplace.” The town’s level of assessment, often referred to as the equalization rate, has dropped from 93 to 77 percent since the last reassessment. That rate would have fallen still further, to 70 percent, this year.

“The real estate market itself is causing values to be out of whack,” Bartholomew said. According to the regional director, there are 1,062 parcels in the Town of Coventry, of which 684 are classified as residential, eight commercial and 370 as vacant land. Because residential, commercial and undeveloped parcels all change in value at different rates, “inequities creep into the roll.”

Property owners feel these inequities at tax time.