As crews cut down burned trees and utility workers fix the power grid , Spokane County Assessor Tom Konis said he's certain the catastrophic Spokane Complex fires caused more than $1 billion in damage and will rank as the most expensive wildfire in Washington history.
The Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview fires of Aug. 1 destroyed 833 homes. However, private and public crews have just begun the process of determining how many more structures the blazes either burned or damaged, Konis said.
He won't have hard numbers for another six weeks as documenting losses continues. But he expects that number to be large.
"One billion is the number we're using. That's kind of what my wild guess is at this point in time," he told The Spokesman-Review. "The 833 number is staggering, especially for a town that was already thousands of homes behind where we should have been to have ... a level market on the real estate side.
"Now we need 800-plus more houses built. I don't know how we're gonna do it. I don't know how long it's going to take."
State law requires Konis, as assessor, to get a value of structures lost by natural disaster and then lower the assessments for those who suffered property losses.
As a result, homeowners who lost homes or suffered damage to their homes will get breaks in property taxes. Homeowners who already paid their taxes for 2026 and then suffered either loss or damage in the fires will receive refunds, he said.
Those new, lower, assessments will remain in effect until 2027.
"Everything I've read and seen makes me think that, yeah, it will be the largest that we've ever had," Konis said referring to costliest fire in state history.
Practice run
Three years ago, Konis led the effort to document the damage from the Gray fire near Medical Lake and the Oregon Road fire near Elk. Those two fires, which both occurred on Aug. 18, 2023, burned a combined 366 homes and 710 total structures.
The assessed damage for those events, released some three months after the fires, was $166 million. That figure, in 2023, set the current record for costliest fire in state history.
"We had massive notes on what we did," Konis said. "And the first thing I did Monday morning, on the 3rd, was break out the notes. We had our first management meeting at 8:30 Monday morning to get started. That was way before we could even get a plane in the air or anybody into the evacuation zones."
The current effort encompasses all 1,200, or so, properties that fell within the evacuation zones. And that does not just include the ones that suffered damage, he said.
"The ones that are completely gone, that's easy," Konis said. "We take our existing assessed value and zero it out except for the land. The land value will stay. You still own the land.
"But for the ones that are partially damaged, what we're going to really lean on is what the insurance adjuster comes up with."
For a homeowner who had vinyl siding warped and windows damaged, the county personnel aren't the best at guessing that value, he said.
"Our system values the whole house," he said. "So, we are going to lean on the insurance adjusters a lot on those types of things."
For homeowners who lost a shed or fence, the county would then adjust their assessment based on that loss. But those values that will be included in Konis' final numbers have nothing to do with any of the possessions in the homes.
"We're not taking into account that you lost your refrigerator," he said, "and those kinds of things, or the hotel nights, and those kinds of adjustments — just the physical adjustment to your house."
The county also has no role in calculating the loss of hundreds of cars that were burned.
"We do not value cars. So, there is no adjustment on our end from that," he said. "All we can adjust from is the current assessed value on things we prior had assessed."
Asked how he expects the damage from the recent fires to be so much higher than the 2023 fires, Konis said many of the homes consumed by the Old Trails fire greatly exceeded the value from the homes lost near Elk.
"If you take, you know, the $450,000, which is the average value for a house in Spokane County, and multiply it by 833 ... I don't feel that it's going to do it total justice," he said. "I have a feeling it's going to be higher than that."
He also noted that the Gray and Oregon Road fires had more outbuildings burned than homes. He expects the number from the Spokane Complex fires to continue climbing once crews begin to put eyes on individual properties.
"There was this gorgeous horse barn up in the Fairview fire. I had been there years ago taking my daughter there," Konis said. "And it was completely destroyed. It's just those types of things."
Making the count
After the fires, Konis hired NCTech, which uses vehicles that drive around neighborhoods taking close-up, 360-degree images of damage caused by the fires.
The county also hired Eagleview Aerial Imagery to record images from overhead.
"We've used them for 20 years," Konis said of Eagleview. "They flew over the fires on the 7th and 8th, so we have aerial images of all the fire zones."
Those long-range images help county appraisers quickly determine homes that were destroyed, and thus, zeroing out their tax assessments.
"We're pulling in information from as many different sources as we can," he said. "The idea is for us to not be in people's way. If we can do it through technology, all the better."
While the long-range and close-up photos help, county personnel will need to speak with homeowners who suffered damage.
"We will probably still have to go out and meet with those property owners and have a good tour of the property," Konis said.
However, the assessment changes won't be limited to homes that were lost or suffered damage.
Historically, the home values of properties just outside the range of fires tends to go up.
"I know even in my neighborhood, we had two houses that had been listed for a number of weeks. Both went pending last week," Konis said. "That's exactly what happened with the Oregon Road and Gray fires. The area outside of it, those values went up."
But homeowners whose structures survived may see the opposite.
"Conversely, the homes standing inside the fire zones temporarily went down in value," Konis said, still referring to the 2023 fires. "They've gone back up now to where they were." The current Spokane fire zone is "not a pretty place to be right now."
"We will watch any sales that come through and we'll adjust, as we normally do, every year."
Return of the exemption
One tool that the victims of the 2023 fires were able to use was a state law that gave homeowners a three-year property tax exemption that locked in the value of their home after they completed a rebuild.
For instance, if a homeowner lost a home valued at $200,000 and completed a new home valued at $5 million, the law allowed the homeowner to continue to pay taxes on the previous value for three years after completion.
However, that law had a sunset clause that ended last June.
"So after that, the assessor cannot take in these applications," Konis said. "We're working with (State) Sen. Jeff Holy and Sen. Marcus Riccelli right now on trying to get that presented, hopefully the first week of the session, and have it be retroactive."
In the meantime, homeowners shouldn't worry if the damage from the recent fires somehow got missed by county crews. Konis noted that property owners have a three-year window to make their cases for lower assessments based on the blazes.
"We can do that for up to three years after the fire happens," he said.
Other costs
While the county trudges forward to get a value of lost structures, the city of Spokane and Avista Utilities are working on estimates for damage to everything from power poles to wastewater pump stations.
"Dry and windy conditions have resulted in rapid spread of the fires in the Company's service territory, resulting in customer outages and evacuations," Avista officials wrote in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "The fires have caused extensive damage to the Company's transmission and distribution facilities serving West Spokane."
Asked to estimate the cost to replace that damaged equipment, Avista spokesman David Vowels wrote that he could not.
"It is too early to provide a reliable estimate of the total costs associated with the fires," he wrote in part. "First and foremost, our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Spokane Complex Fires as they continue to navigate the impacts of these events."
Spokane Director of Public Facilities Marlene Feist could not immediately be reached for comment, but department spokeswoman Kirstin Davis wrote that the fires either destroyed or damaged several water tanks, sewer lift stations, water mains, several street signs, one traffic signal, about 500 water meters, about 1,300 waste carts and many trees.
"Other City Departments also are gathering their damages as well," Davis wrote. "We are working on the costs of these losses and do not have those yet."
For Konis, he said the damage numbers will be difficult to fathom.
"We are lucky in a given year to add a billion dollars in new construction," he said. "To think that, you know, a billion dollars was just taken off in a matter of hours.
"Just the fact that so many people's lives changed," he continued, "that's harder for me to get my head around than a bunch of numbers."
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