Colorado Businesses Lose Pandemic Valuation Cases at High Court

The Colorado Supreme Court sided with local tax assessors Tuesday, holding that they weren’t obligated to reassess hundreds of commercial properties mid-cycle to take pandemic restrictions into account.

The pandemic wasn’t a “detrimental act of nature” and related public health orders weren’t “regulations restricting the use of land” that would set off a reassessment, the court held in four unanimous opinions.

“Requiring a mid-cycle revaluation based on a global pandemic would be absurd, both because every property would be at least indirectly affected by it and because COVID-19 is not a single event (like a landslide); rather, the intangible impacts ...