Digital 60 & 80 Merritt, LLC v. Board of Assessment Appeals

Citations

• 211 Conn. App. 559

Syllabus

The defendant town of Trumbull and its Board of Assessment Appeals appealed to this court from the judgment of the trial court sustaining the plaintiff's appeals from the decisions of the board, which upheld the town's tax assessments levied against the plaintiff's real property. In 2010, the plaintiff purchased the real property with the intent of leasing it out as a data center, a location to house and secure electronic data. It organized the building into colocation suites, each of which were occupied by multiple users. The plaintiff provided the space, the raised floors, power, cooling, Internet connectivity, security, and the redundancy required to store the electronic data, and the colocation customers either provided their own computers or leased them from the plaintiff. In 2011, the plaintiff decided to remediate and expand the property to, inter alia, build two additional data suites, Suite 210 and Suite 220. The plaintiff intended each suite to be occupied by a single wholesale customer, who would supply its own computers and racks. The plaintiff, however, was unable to find wholesale customers for the new suites and, by mid-2013, it was leasing space within Suite 210 to colocation customers. The construction on Suite 220 was never com- pleted. By the time of trial, it remained raw space with only an unfinished concrete floor, walls, and a ceiling in place. As a result, the plaintiff claimed that the suite was unfit to be leased even as powered base building (PBB) space, which would require the plaintiff to supply a space with completed exterior construction, power, and connectivity, while the customer would build out the interior to its own specifications. The town assessed the property as part of its revaluation for its 2011 grand list. It then conducted interim reassessments of the property in 2013 and 2014, pursuant to the applicable statute (§ 12-53a), to take into account the new construction. Following these reassessments, the town assessor determin