Don’t count on paying lower property taxes in 2009, even though your house or business is probably worth less on the real estate market.

The Pima County Assessor’s Office set your full cash value for next year last March. If you got a decrease then, it was probably far less than the value your real estate has actually lost in today’s market.

You’ll get another notice of full cash value this spring, but it will be the assessor’s estimate of your property’s worth for 2010, and it probably won’t be much lower than the value you got in the mail nine months ago.

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For the first time since Arizona adopted a computerized mass appraisal system for home values in the 1960s, prices have plummeted in the past two years.

But neither the state’s computer program nor the employees who administer it have much experience in dealing with falling property prices.

They’re used to working with values that go up year after year after year. And most of them overlooked a key factor when prices began shooting up two years ago.

Even when the same people were buying several houses a year, it appears neither the Arizona Department of Revenue nor the state’s 15 county assessors recognized those buyers were speculators, not average homeowners.

So they accepted virtually all sales at face value, even when speculators were bidding against each other for new homes in the same subdivisions. All of those sales went into the computer, producing annual increases of 10 to 30 percent - or more - in the full cash values of the speculators’ homes and all others.

A few of us criticized the Department of Revenue and the assessors for not disqualifying the speculators’ inflated purchases from the market data governments used to set tax values.

It appears no one was listening.

Now selling prices are dropping because of the national economy, foreclosures, bankruptcies and a tight pool of lending money for legitimate home buyers.

Too many houses are on the market because their owners can’t afford them, and too few of them are selling. In many cases, houses that do sell, fetch prices below their market prices or full cash values of two or three years ago.

The falling market and criticisms that government appraisers treated speculative sales as “normal” when prices rose could well cause those same appraisers to scrutinize the few current sales they find. They could decide to disregard today’s lower prices because they might be foreclosure-related.

Not entering that data will mean assessors will have fewer sales to use in setting full cash values for 2010, and most sales they retain in their data bases would be higher than those they rejected.

Worse yet, officials might decide to go back more than 18 months for sales that took place during the housing boom.

Let’s hope they don’t do that. If they counted nearly all the rising sales two years ago, it’s only fair for them to count the falling sales from the current market.

Arizona’s dual valuation system causes another problem for property owners. Some property taxes are levied against a “full cash value” that supposedly is a property’s current market value. Other taxes are set on a “limited value” that keeps a part of the tax burden from rising too steeply in one year.

If you’re a homeowner whose most recent limited value was below your full cash value, you will see your limited value rise next year (and perhaps in future years) until both values are equal.

Finally, remember that governments at all levels are short of money, and most officials who set property tax rates won’t have to run for re-election in 2009. That means they won’t worry much about raising property tax rates to collect more money.

Maybe you’d better have that second glass of wine New Year’s Eve.

It’s almost certain our newly elected legislature will be too busy cutting Arizona’s projected budget to solve this dilemma in its upcoming session.

Contact Steve Emerine or e-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Emerine, a Tucson resident since 1960, has run Steve Emerine Strategic Public Relations since 1994. He is a former local newspaper reporter, editor and columnist and served as Pima County Assessor from 1973 to 1980. He is a regular Monday guest on the John C. Scott radio talk show, which airs from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. and from noon to 1 p.m. weekdays on The Voice KVOI 690-AM. This column appears weekly in Inside Tucson Business.