CITY ASSESSMENT COURT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 11110, 8 July 1899, Page 5

CITY ASSESSMENT COURT.

TAXING HOTEL PROPERTY. SPECIAL VALUE HELD TO BE RATABLE. THE STAR HOTEL CASE. The Assessment Court for the City of Auckland sat again yesterday morning, when the judge, Mr. H. W. Brabant, S.M., gave his decision in the matter of the objection of the owners and occupiers of the Star Hotel, against the valuation of that property for rating purposes, which was heard on Wednesday.

j His Worship said it was an objection made by i the ocoupier and the owners of the Star Hotel, | in Albert-street, to thjj hotel being assessed ! at the ratable value of £600 per annum, the i avertment of the objectors being that the ! ratable value was loss than that stated on ! the valuation roll. After hearing argument j he adjourned the case in order that he might I givo a written judgment, because of the im- ! portance of the question, and as a guide to : the valuer for next year, for if the main 1 contention of the objectors were to prevail, namely, that the hotel must be valued as a , building, and not as a, hotel, it would affect the valuation of all the hotels in Auckland, and the ratable value of all those on the valuation list would, he concluded, be wrong. His Worship quoted the provision of the | Eating Act, 1894, as amended by tho Act of 1895, for ascertaining the ratable value, and said that in the City of Auckland the annual system was in force. His v» orship then read over the note of the evidence he had taken, and touched on the arguments advanced by counsel. He had, he said, read the English cases cited during the argument. They were decisions as to what evidence was admissible to prove the ratable value in respect of publichouses, but there was no doubt from them all that in England the value was always that of the publichouse as such, and not merely of the building, which was licensed as a publichouse. Those cases did not, however, appear to him to be conclusive on the present question, because in England the ratable value was the value at which the premises would let from year to year, and there was no provision such as that in our Act, that "the annual value shall in no case be less than 5 per cent, on the value of the fee simple," and it was that provision which it was agreed raised the annual value of the Stai Hotel to £600. Ho was therefore driven to interpret the provision himself, and he might remark that Mr. Napier in his argument dwelt on the dictum of Lord Esher, M.R., in the case of Dodds v. Poor Law Union of South Shields, where he said "theratable value is to be found according to the method pointed out by the Act of Parliament." His Worship thought there could be no doubt that the words "value of the fee simple" meant the value at which the property would sell. 1; appeared equally plain that the fact of the building being licensed as a hotel would affect the selling value. The Government valuation of Land Act provided in section 5 a particular mode of arriving at values, and under that possibly the use a building was intended for, or was put to, could not be taken into consideration. He offered no opinion on that question, but the Act was not passed until two years after the Eating Act, and it was provided in section. 9 that tho valuation roll prepared under it "shall be the standard roll from which the valuation rolls of all local authorities rating on the capital value or on the unimproved value shall be framed." The plain inference was that it was intended to exclude the rolls of local authorities rating on the annual value, as the City of Auckland did. The evidence was that the hotel was worth £12,000 as such, and he must decide to sustain the valuation. When the case was argued, Mr. Napier appeared for the objectors and Mr. Theo. Cooper for the City Council.