BELL’S ESTATE TO ASSESSOR: BAD CALL
Adjudicator biased over claim of phone: owners
The owners of Alexander Graham Bell’s mansion on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island are fighting the property’s tax assessment, accusing a member of the body that hears assessment appeals of bias after he questioned Bell’s legacy as the inventor of the telephone.
“I confess I am not a fan of (Bell’s) claim to fame,” adjudicator Raffi Balmanoukian wrote in a May 2017 decision denying the estate’s request to reduce the government’s value estimate for the property.
Bell’s descendants, who own the 125-year-old Queen Anne-style manor called Beinn Bhreagh Hall, argued the provincial property valuation service had wildly overestimated the value of the home, perched at the edge of a peninsula overlooking Bras d’Or Lake and Baddeck, N.S.
The province believes the house is worth $900,000, but the family says its worth only half that, since the government-mandated upkeep on the heritage property drastically reduces its market value. The owners say they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep the home and its 23-acre property up to the standards required by the a government conservation easement. If the province’s valuation stands, the owners stand to pay roughly $10,000 a year in tax rather than the $5,000 they believe they should be paying.
After a hearing at the Nova Scotia Assessment Appeal Tribunal last spring, Balmanoukian wrote a fourpage decision on the case, siding with the provincial assessor. However, he opened by wading into a controversial debate about the true inventor of the telephone.
Years before Bell filed his patent in 1876, Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant in New York, filed a caveat — a way to preemptively register an invention before a more detailed patent could be filed. But Meucci didn’t renew it when it expired, and never filed a patent.
“If Antonio Meucci had renewed his patent office caveat for his ‘sound telegraph,’ this appeal may not have been before me today,” Balmanoukian wrote. “Instead, the name Dr. Alexander Graham Bell is forever associated with the telephone.” The adjudicator did, however, applaud Bell’s contributions to National Geographic magazine.
“Be that as it may, and personal proclivities aside, this appeal presents novel issues,” he wrote, before launching into a lengthy discussion on the homeowners’ claim that Beinn Bhreagh was worth only $475,000. He found their argument unsatisfactory, since their professional appraisal was conducted for the wrong tax year. He agreed the upkeep demands on the property — which cost $1.6M in 2013 alone — would narrow the pool of prospective buyers. But, he said, it was unclear whether those expenses would continue in perpetuity. Ending on a hopeful note, he encouraged the owners to try another appeal: “I indulge myself by saying, ‘please hang up and try your call again.’”
Bell’s descendants appealed Balmanoukian’s decision and will appear at a hearing in May, the Halifax Chronicle Herald reported last week. In the request for an appeal, the estate’s lawyer Nicole LaFosse alleged Balmanoukian’s “personal opinions with respect to Mr. Alexander Graham Bell” were evidence of bias. To prove her point, LaFosse attached a letter from Bell’s great-grandson, the historian Edwin Grosvenor.
“I just laughed,” Grosvenor, who has written two books on Bell, told the National Post. “It just seemed odd to me that a tax assessor would bring up an issue like that from the 1870s.”
In his letter, addressed directly to Balmanoukian, Grosvenor dismissed the “spurious claims” about Meucci. While Meucci filed his caveat before Bell’s patent, a U.S. judge found significant proof that Meucci’s invention didn’t actually work, Grosvenor noted.
“With all due respect, sir, I can tell you that no serious historian of early telecommunications takes the Meucci claims seriously,” he wrote. “We hope you will refrain from perpetrating the Meucci fiction.”
In an interview with the Post, Balmanoukian denied being in the Meucci camp.
“I don’t accept your premise that I’m in any particular camp or that I have any particular bias or you know, that I have any animus,” he said. “I reject that. But other than that, I’m not prepared to speak to a case that’s in front of the court.”
On May 8, the Beinn Bhreagh estate will appeal the decision to the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board — the second tier in a threetier appeals system. The appeal won’t focus on whether Balmanoukian was biased, since it’s a de novo hearing — which means a fresh start with no dissection of the previous hearing.