In the spring of 2024, a local real estate firm sued the city of Richmond, claiming officials had erroneously jacked up the tax bill on about 18 acres of industrial property near the Port of Richmond.

City Hall ultimately agreed to correct the issue by lowering the assessed property values for the three affected parcels and issuing a $37,152 tax refund to the company, developer Charles Macfarlane’s CK-Klein-Macfarlane, making amends for overpayments. The broad terms of that deal were settled in October 2025.

But according to court documents, the city’s own lawyers couldn’t get the embattled Finance Department to calculate the exact amount the taxpayer was owed and issue the refund. The delay was costing the city about $10 a day by adding to the interest owed to the company, as Macfarlane’s attorney made clear in more than a dozen emails prodding the city to follow through on the agreement.

“I share your frustration,” Deputy City Attorney Wirt Marks wrote to the opposing lawyer as 2025 ended with no resolution.

Though tax disputes are fairly common, the documents filed in the case shed light on the silos of authority within City Hall, with the office that handles legal matters seemingly having limited ability to force a response from the department in charge of money and billing.

In another late-2025 email, Marks said he too “would like this off my plate.”

“Unfortunately there are many new folks in Finance and I don’t have the contacts I have had in the past,” he wrote to the attorney on the other side of the lawsuit.

After several months passed, the company’s lawyer, Shane Smith, suggested a workaround. He proposed having a judge order the Finance Department to give the money back, which would create a court-mandated deadline after less binding requests didn’t seem to work.

In an unusual legal twist, the city attorney’s office agreed to the May 1 order requiring the city to make the payment within 10 days, a move that essentially meant the city was inviting more court pressure on itself to get the matter resolved. Nearly six months after the parties seemed to settle the issue outside of court, a judge ordered the city to lower the assessments of the three properties and issue the tax refund by check, with at least $3,552 in interest tacked on.

The case was sparked by reassessment notices sent out for 2024, in which the city suggested  the three parcels on Commerce Road saw their taxable value increase by 81%, 32.5% and 19.6% from the previous year.  According to the lawsuit, one of the properties saw an “astounding” 293% increase in land value, jumping from $277,000 to more than $1 million.

The company alleged the city had incorrectly inflated the value of the property by using a flawed assessment methodology and seemingly forgetting the existence of “buried hazardous waste” that limits the property’s market value. (The properties in question are near the site of the DuPont plant that has had well-known issues with soil and groundwater contamination).

CK-Klein Macfarlane first filed an assessment appeal with the Board of Equalization, but the new values were upheld.

After the company sued, the city initially denied the allegation before agreeing to settle last fall, just before the two sides were due to appear in court for a hearing.

On Oct. 15, the lawyers agreed on new assessment figures. For the 2024 tax year, the city lowered the taxable value for the three properties by a combined $1.48 million, landing on values a little higher than what the company demanded in its initial court filing. Assessments for 2025 and 2026 were also adjusted downward.

The end seemed to be in sight. At the time, Smith, Macfarlane’s lawyer, asked Marks, the deputy city attorney, if it could all be wrapped up within a week.

Over the course of 16 follow-up emails asking the city for updates, Smith had to adjust.He asked if it would be possible to resolve things by November. When that didn’t happen, he asked if it could be done by the end of the year.

“Do you think it’d help for me to send the person in Finance flowers or a box of chocolates?” Smith joked in a Dec. 4 email to the city attorney’s office.

Other messages had a more serious tone.

In late December, Smith noted the delay had probably already cost the city at least $1,000 in interest.

“I realize that’s not going to break the bank, but it’s adding up,” he wrote.

By late March and early April, patience was slipping. Smith started hinting that he was willing to take things back to the court to enforce the terms of the agreement.

“We’ve given up on them getting this done (and done correctly) absent a court order for them to do so,” Smith wrote on March 30.

On April 14, he did just that, filing a new motion styled as an attempt to “bring more than six months of futility with the city’s Finance Department to an end.”

“To date, the city has incurred an estimated $1,661.67 in unnecessary additional interest… due to the Finance Department’s failure or refusal to complete its refund/abatement and interest calculation work, with additional incurred (and unnecessary) interest accruing at the rate of $10.18 per day,” Smith wrote in the court filing.

The blunt email exchanges between the two lawyers were attached to that filing as evidence of the Finance Department’s apparent non-responsiveness to the city’s own attorney.

Attempts to reach Smith and Macfarlane for this story were unsuccessful.

A city spokesperson said only that the matter has been resolved, and all money owed was paid by June 3.

Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org