A helicopter makes its first pass along Idaho’s South Fork of the Snake River on Thursday while a boat team sweeps the waterway looking for Rob Merrill, a Victor, Idaho, resident and fly-fishing guide whose drift boat capsized Wednesday night. Jeannette Boner/courtesy of Valley Citizen Order
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Marian Butler, 82, touches photographs of her nine children, and a tenth who died at birth, on the walls of her Alta home. Butler raised all of her children under the roof of the Swiss-style house she built with her husband in 1948. NEWS&GUIDE PHOTO / BRADLY J. BONER
ALTA – A yellow butterfly dances up the walkway of Marian Butler’s home and lands in a box full of pink geraniums hanging from the front stoop.
Her home on the western border of Wyoming looks as though it was plucked from a fairy tale, a Swiss chalet almost like a gingerbread house. Butler, 82, laid the stones for the fireplace 60 years ago, crossed the threshold as a bride, raised nine children here, buried a 10th, and spent a quarter century caring for a husband with Parkinson’s disease.
A hand-painted sign stretching across the front reads, “Wherever you wander, wherever you roam, be happy and healthy and glad to come home.”
Dedicated to “2 square feet of solid improvements” in her yard each day, she pauses over the papers on her coffee table, tax records and bills that demand $5,650 for her home and about 30 acres. Butler, living on $1,000 a month in Social Security – minus a 10 percent donation to the Mormon church – faces a tax increase that’s affected many across Teton County this year as assessors updated property values to reflect Teton County’s expensive market.
She can’t afford it.
“I’m being taxed out of my home,” Butler said. “When half of my money every month goes to taxes, how am I going to live?”
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Butler isn’t the only Teton County resident who’s facing steep increases in property taxes, which went up from about $3,500 last year. Some have reported triple-digit increases in 2008. But for the elderly, the rising costs are particularly difficult.
Butler has four weeks to scrape together the money for her tax bill. Teton County residents must pay the first installement of property taxes Nov. 1.
Taxes are based on a property’s assessment and increase if a home is improved or if the assessor determines – often because of the sale of similar, nearby properties – that market forces increased its value in the last year.
A property’s assessed value is based on an analysis of local sales data in 2007 and reflects the market value of real property. An assessor must list a property’s value at between 95 percent and 105 percent of market value.
County Assessor Cathy Toolson said the only reason Butler’s bill grew exponentially is that she used the family exemption to subdivision rules to split her land, located on the road to Grand Targhee Resort, for her children.
“She lost her agricultural status,” Toolson said. “Now all those parcels can be offered on the open market.”
When Butler subdivided in 2006, she said, she went to the assessor’s office to find out if her taxes would increase. She said she was told that increase would be minimal and that the agricultural status would continue. The only reason she subdivided her 120 acres was to prevent her children from fighting over the estate after she’s gone.
“In our community, several people have died and left big families of children,” Butler said. “They have been so intent on everybody getting their share, it’s caused huge family feuds in more than one family.”
Butler worried about the same happening in her family, particularly as land values continue to rise and people stand to make a fortune from old farming grounds. So she took her 120 acres and carved out 10-acre parcels for each of her nine children. Butler kept three parcels, one totaling 18 acres, another totaling 9.73 acres and the last one totaling 2.5 acres. Taxes for her children's parcels total about $16,000. Butler must pay $5,650 for the 30 acres she retains.
Though there’s been no development on the land and it still produces barley every year, the parcels are taxed like they are on the free market. One son sold his 10-acre parcel to his brother, but there are no development plans, Butler said.
She said her children’s taxes are so steep – $1,800 each – that they can’t help. Her savings have almost been depleted, because she dipped into them in previous years.
“This can’t go on, and I can’t promise to die in two years,” Butler said.
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Butler turned to the assessor, to county commissioners and to state lawmakers for help. She’s gotten nowhere.
When asked this week if she’s heard about any of the state assistance programs, she said no.
Wyoming offers programs for people struggling to pay their taxes. Butler would qualify for all of them and could save up to $3,800 if she applied.
An exemption for Veterans of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War would save her $175 a year. A tax rebate program for the elderly would save her at least $800 annually. She’s also eligible for a property tax refund program that would return about half her taxes. Yet Butler would have to pay the full $5,600 before she’d see the rebate. Finally, there’s a property tax deferral program that would allow Butler to postpone payment of half her taxes, which creates a perpetual lien against the property.
This is the only one Butler knows about, and she refuses to take advantage of it. Only four Teton County households and five across the state used the program in 2006.
“That’s exactly like taking a mortgage out on your ranch,” she said. “It’s no longer yours. Half belongs to the county, and I won’t do that. I would rather sell.”
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If she did that, Butler knows she’d be a “multimillionaire.”
“Where would I go?” Butler said. “Down in some condominium and bump elbows with my neighbors? I don’t want to live like that. I like to putt around and fix things and see things grow.”
Then there’s the obvious. Butler has lived in this home for 60 years. She and her first husband built it a little at a time, finishing the kitchen, the nursery and a bedroom before they moved in. They later finished the three bedrooms upstairs as their family grew.
The couple built it in the Swiss tradition. The Durtschi family, her first husband’s, moved to Alta from Switzerland and bought the land in the early 1900s. The couple were given the land when they married.
Pictures of Butler’s nine children, their spouses, her 41 grandchildren and 39 great-grandchildren hang on the walls.
Here, Butler has created oil paintings of mountains and spent hours playing her piano. She’s prepared meals in her red kitchen, decorated with heart plates, heart mugs, heart wallpaper and heart fabric. Sometimes, the grandchildren stay busy counting the hearts in the room. There are hundreds.
In winter, Butler moves the geraniums into a large metal window box in front of her kitchen sink. Here, they keep till spring, when they are moved back outside.
In the back yard, she has a garden where she grows vegetables such carrots and rutabagas. Her fire pit hosts family gatherings, which, “you can imagine,” are quite big, she said.
Butler and her second husband, Troy, whom she married in 1992, contemplated selling the property and moving to a “nice house” in Rexburg, Idaho. But since both are healthy – they don’t take any medications – she wonders if they would like living in Rexburg.
“How would it be to buy a nice big house and go and sit on the couch and look at each other?” Butler said. “He doesn’t like TV, so I just figured if we want to stay alive, we better stay working.”
What, then, would happen to the little house on the road to Grand Targhee Resort? Would someone remove the welcome greeting? Would new owners leave the other sign on the back of the house that Butler painted in honor of her first husband after his death?
“Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man,” it reads.
;)
