By now you should have received your 2009 Property Tax Statement from Pima County. If you’re like me and most people I’ve talked to about it, the notice arrived Oct. 1 — the same day it was due to be paid. (Didn’t Congress pass a law saying credit card companies couldn’t do such things?)

Oh well, you have until 5 p.m. Nov. 2 to pay the first half of the payment.

In any event, when the bills arrived I had hoped that I could find some trends among people I know as to what happened to their property taxes.

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You’ll recall there were reports of assessed valuation going up an average 7 percent and tax rates coming down anywhere from 3 to 9 percent. But what really happened after everything was put together? What was the bottom line? Did tax bills go up? Did they go down? What taxing entity had the biggest swings? 

Well, after talking to a geographically random sample of 11 homeowners and two business owners I can tell you the average among them is that their tax bills went down nearly 3.2 percent.

Everybody got hit with a state tax for school equalization that had been suspended for three years. All but one person I talked with saw their primary taxes to run Pima County government go up, on average by 7.5 percent. The county’s secondary taxes to pay for voter approved bonds and such was up 16.4 percent but the dollar figure amounted to an average of less than $50 for the year.

In my little focus group, there were four people who pay property taxes to the City of Tucson. They went up an average of 4.7 percent, which amounted to just $3.80 for a year.

School districts seemed to have taken a hit everywhere. The biggest drops I found were in Catalina Foothills, where the primary taxes on three property tax statements went down an average 28.9 percent. Which is ironic, considering voters in that school district have approved every tax override and bond election that’s ever been put before them. Clearly they’ve voted to pay more for their schools and yet in the convoluted way Arizona computes property taxes, the amount they’re paying dropped dramatically.

In Tucson Unified School District, the average of three taxpayers’ bills was down 11 percent.

I made no attempt to be scientific but the year-to-year changes in tax statements was about as random as it could be.

In the end, media reports about average increases or decreases don’t really play out that way. As taxpayers we may feel better if we wind up paying less than the average increase but there’s going to be a few people who are stuck with bills that are way outside the averages.

Maybe that’s the way the system is supposed to work. After all, without a critical mass it prevents taxpayers from rallying behind a common cause. This way government can keep on functioning just as it always has.

For your sake I hope your property taxes went down.  

Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237.