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Neshue Histaric istrict Commission

229 Main Street Nashua, NH 03061-2016

To: Board of Aldermen - Infrastructure Committee
From: Historic District Commission
Subj: 482 Amherst Street, Country Tavern

Date: September 24, 2019

At the September 23, 2019 regular meeting of the Historic District Commission (HDC), a majority of the
attending members voted to suppor the release of the Facade Easement for the Country Tavern Restaurant, at
452 Amherst Street. The Commissioners are awere that the restaurant is not located in their jurisdiction.

The HDC members were in agrecment of the stipulations that included:

4, $30,000 contribution to the City of Nashua
Exclusive salvage rights to the City of Nashua
An effort ic preserve the mature trees on site
Release of the Facade Hasement

ee
i fhe lh

go . f

( pf ge Q
Robert Sampson, Chairman & .
Historic District Commission

THE CITY OF NASHUA “the Gate City"

Economucs Develooment

To: Scott Leclair, Planning Board Chair
From: Tim Cummings, Director of Economic Development

Ce: Andrew Prolman. Attorney ~ Prunier & Prolman, PA.
Date: September’2019

Re: 452 Amherst Street — Release of Facade Easement

Backeround
Alla Maak Properties. LLC has petitioned to the City io Release the Fagade Easement on 452 Amherst
Street (the Country Tavern Restaurant), The Board of Aldermen’s Infrastructure Committee referred the

petition to the Planning Board of their recommendation.
The Planning Board was previously supplied with the following:

® The NH Division of Historic Resources determination that the Property is NOT eligible for the
National Historic Register,

* Historic Preservationist Lisa Mausolf's Report explaining why the property has little to no
historic value.

* Acted in accordance with the Cin’s Master Plan objectives on Historical Resources. by providing
@ documentation of the history of the structure for the City to be archived in its historical resource
database.

Furthermore, Since the July, 1.2019 Memo from Roger Houston the City, through its Econontic
Development, Community Development and Legal team. have entered into a dialog with the applicant to
discuss a reasonable alternative to simply removing the facade easement from the property thal would be
a win-win for ali involved.

To that end, the parties have worked closely these past few weeks toward an agreement acceptable to the
City and Alla Maak Properties. Our Agreement includes:

: A $50,000.00 contribution to the City
‘ Exclusive salvage rights to the City
‘ An effort to preserve the mature trees an site
. Release of the Facade Easement
Request

Considering that the Property has little tc no historic value, and we have a substantive Agreement in
place, we respectfully request the Board's positive recommendation to the Board of Alderman to release
the Facade Easement.

Auditorium Commission

Keith Weirich (Reappointment)
14 Court Street
Nashua, NH 03060

Cultural Connections Committee

Jessica Gorhan
97 Western Avenue
Henniker, NH 03242

Historic District Commission

William Slivinski
46 Berkeley Street
Nashua, NH 03064

Planning Board

Lawrence Hirsch
12 Salmon Brook Drive
Nashua, NH 03062

APPOINTMENTS BY THE MAYOR

OCTOBER 8, 2019

Term to Expire

Term to Expire

Term to Expire

Term to Expire

| respectfully request that these appointments be confirmed.

Jim Donchess

Mayor

> March 31, 2021

: December 31, 2020

: June 30, 2022

> March 31, 2020

A special meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at 6:45 p.m. in the
Aldermanic Chamber.

President Lori Wilshire presided; City Clerk Susan K. Lovering recorded.

Prayer was offered by City Clerk Susan K. Lovering; Alderman Patricia Klee led in the Pledge
to the Flag.

The roll call was taken with 10 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Laws, Alderwoman Kelly,
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja. Alderman Tencza, and Alderman Clemons were recorded absent.

His Honor, Mayor James W. Donchess, and Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton were also in attendance.
President Wilshire

Alderwoman Kelly is not feeling well and won’t be joining us this evening and Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja is running
a little late but she will be here.

COMMUNICATIONS

From: Lori Wilshire, President, Board of Aldermen
Re: Special Board of Aldermen Meeting

There being no objection, President Wilshire accepted the communication and placed it on file.

DISCUSSION
Assessing Update.
President Wilshire

We are going to invite the Director of Administrative Services, Ms. Kleiner, to join us and give us an Assessing
Update. Thank you for being here this evening.

Kim Kleiner, Director of Administrative Services

Good evening and thank you for inviting us to update you on all of the improvements that we have made to the
Assessing function. So last we were here, we were here at the end of April and we presented you the
improvement plan which we have been working on hard. Before | begin, if you don’t mind, | would like to
introduce some of the Assessing Staff, who have all joined us here this evening.

President Wilshire

That would be wonderful, thank you.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 2

Ms. Kleiner

So if they’d stand: Louise Brown, the Administrative Supervisor; Greg Turgiss, Commercial Assessor; Amanda
Mazerolle, Administrative; Lynn Cameron, Administrative Specialist; Mike Mandle, Residential Assessor, Doug
Dame, Commercial Assessor; Gary Turgiss, Residential Assessor. We also have the three members of the
Board of Assessors with us, Mr. Paul Bergeron, Mr. Bob Earley and Mr. Dan Hansberry, who is currently serving
as Chair.

President Wilshire

Thank you very much, that was nice to meet everyone.

Ms. Kleiner

So without the staff, this would not be possible. So this is their accomplishments and | thank them for putting up
with me every day. So this staffing level has remained the same since April, except we have had Karina Ochoa
join the Administrative Services Office. She is the Administrative Assistant within my office. She not only
provides support to me, but she also provides support to the Department. This summer, we also had a junior
form Nashua Senior High School, Alexandra Pickett. She was part of the Mayor’s Internship Program and she
also assisted the Department. You all know Pam Andruskevich, our GIS Technician, who plays a very
important role in the maintaining of property data through Pictometry and GIS Mapping. Pam has joined us here
this evening as well.

As you know, a few weeks ago we presented a plan here to PEDC on all the important changes that are
happening within GIS. Upon passing of Legislation before you, Assessing will hire a temporary Assessor for 3
to 6 months, part-time, up to $20,000.00. We hope for your consideration in that Legislation this evening; that is
very important to us.

You saw this back in April, this was our Assessing Improvement Mind Map. This laid out for us the areas that
we believed we would touch upon within the Improvement Plan. So | wanted to bring that back because you will
see a number of these areas discussed as we discuss the progress that has been made so far. So we put the
progress into 5 key areas of improvement: Transparency, Customer Service, Efficiency & Data Collection,
Procedures & Communication, Property Data Accuracy and Software Program Applications. There is a
difference which we will explain later on between Property Data Accuracy and the Data Collection piece.

So Transparency within the Department: in case you haven't noticed, our entire Web Site Page has been re-
designed for easier navigation. The popular links button which is a button right at the top in a row of blue
buttons provides additional tools and information added. The Residential Assessment Information Guide that
was provided by KRT, the Understanding NH Property Taxes, Explanation of Your Tax Bill, Understanding of
your Property Card. So we have tried to make information readily available to tax payers to help them
understand the process. We have also provided on-line access to your property card.

This will be updated once a year; the card represents your December Tax Bill. This is the Property Tax Card
that we see within the Assessing Office; this is not the Web Prop Data that you used to see prior. If you want a
current, live property card, for some reason you think changes have been made from the web site you can e-
mail and we will e-mail back a property record card to you with instructions on how to read it.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 3

Starting in August we introduced the new newsletter, the Assessing Monitor; issued monthly it will provide a lot
of important dates and deadlines, notices of changes and updates within the Department. We want to make
sure that during the Full Measure & List, we can push as much information to our residents as possible. That
has been included in the RFP for the Full Measure & List and will be very important. Residents can sign up for
this newsletter on the web site and they will receive it by e-mail.

Our Board of Assessor meetings; so now our Board of Assessor meetings are held up in the Auditorium, they
are televised on Channel 16, recorded, available on YouTube, minutes are verbatim and available on the web
site. We also created an e-mail address for members of the public to contact the Board of Assessors, that e-
mail address goes to the entire Board and myself in case there is a staff level inquiry that needs to be
investigated for them. Often that address is not for conversation, it is much like the Board of Aldermen e-mail
address. But it does get to the Board and they can view the resident’s inquiry.

Efficiency & Data Collection: One of the problems that came about was you generally had assessors calling
residents and scheduling their own appointments. So as you can imagine in today’s busy society, they would
call, often get the voicemail and they’d have to leave a message and wait for the resident to call them back. The
resident might call them back; they might be in the field. This kind of created a hold up in creating some of
those appointments. So right now we have the Administrative Staff, mostly Ms. Cameron, scheduling those
appointments. And since she is here in the office, you don’t have that telephone tag. And then the assessors
can worry about getting out into the field and completing their appointments.

As | mentioned earlier, the hiring of the temporary employee before you tonight; why is this important? It is
important because we had an increase in our work load, not really anticipate come this September. So as you
may know, we are working with the Legal Department and preparing a response to the BTLA. We are also
working with the Legal Department on a number of appeals that have been filed with the BTLA and Superior
Court. This takes time, it takes Assessor’s time to be in Legal and to walk them through the files and some of
the data. This really arose, otherwise we would have brought this to you much earlier, but we are hoping that
through the NHAAO List Serve and through contacts that we have with other assessors, that we will be able to
fill this position quickly.

We are holding weekly Assessor Meetings; this Monday — yesterday, we had Director Cummings with us from
Economic Development. We are trying to increase the communication with other Departments that may have
information on development within the City. For instance, Director Cummings would have information on
commercial properties and where they may be in their construction process, so to reach out and to make and
use the information and the contacts that we have within the City to the best of our knowledge is important. We
also discuss properties, consistency of methods, and we have a peer review on different properties and
different assessments.

We have re-instituted an updated sales letter, this is a questionnaire that is sent to residents to request and
verify the details of their sale. Over the summer, over 1,179 have been mailed and 304 have been returned.
Why is this important? Well when we are going through the process of qualifying sales, it is important that we
know what information may have been missed on the property card, what information about the sale and the
property they can provide to us. So that is important and we hope that residents will take the time to fill out the
short survey and return it to us.

We also instituted a letter of assessment change. So when a resident has a change in their assessment over
$20,000.00 due to data corrections, we are sending out a letter to inform them. It has been brought to us that
some members of the public would like to see that changed to a percentage, that is something that we are
looking at.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 4

But for the time being, we have letters this year that have gone out for the $20,000.00 and we are going to
maintain that for now.

Research of Best Practices and Consulting; so as many of you know, there was $50,000.00 included in the
budget in Assessing for consulting. This was important especially when we eliminated the Chief Assessor job.
We are taking use of those funds. We are consulting with David Cornell, who is an Assessing Expert. He has
been extremely helpful and very knowledgeable. | have to say that Assessing is a very special field, itis
amazing how knowledgeable and how helpful assessors from different communities have been. They have
reached out to let us know that they are there if we have any technical questions. They have provided their
contact information to us. We have taken use of that a few times. We are also, in the Legislation before you,
have the request for some tablets. Why the tablets are important is that this is going to create efficiency within
the Department. We will load the new AssessPro5 Software on to the tablets. This will allow assessors to make
real-time changes to our system right out in the field. So currently, they have a property card, it is written, they
make changes and they write them down, they bring them back and either they enter them into the system or
the administrative staff helps and enters them into the system. So the changes that we can just incorporate right
there in the field will provide efficiency.

We also have a number of different areas where we are looking at efficiency now. We are looking at the
property cards as we move to AP5 and we are trying to figure out what information needs to be added to the
card, what information needs to maybe be removed from the card because it is not useful to the tax payers but it
still needs to be seen by the assessors. So we are making those types of changes. We also have a property
card revision notification, so we include the property card in the mailing to residents when an abatement is either
approved or denied by the Board of Assessors. This allows them to look at the property card and see if any
data corrections have been made during that process or to question maybe why the denial or the approval has
been made. That was not done prior; prior they just received a letter.

Procedures and Communication; so in addition to the weekly assessor meetings, we also have a weekly
meeting with all staff members. We review data, we review work load, we review procedures, changes in
policies or directives, just general information that all of the staff needs to know. These are important and these
weren't being done and this was an issue that we brought up during the Management Audit. You need to have
widespread communication within any function. They have been very useful. There have been times, | will
admit, especially during the abatement process in July, that the abatements took first slot and we actually had to
postpone some of our weekly staff meetings because the assessors had appointments and needed to be out in
the field. So during July, we did a lot of catch up and passing information from word of mouth but those
abatements had to be done and that was our priority.

| am also providing departmental updates to the Board of Assessors at each meeting. These are generally in
writing. | think | may have shared a couple of them with the Board of Aldermen especially when it was talking
about the number of abatements and things that we were having. But of course you can find them in the review
of minutes from the Board of Assessor’s meeting. The Board of Assessors are currently undergoing a review of
their By-Laws. So as you know, we had the appointment by Mayor Donchess of Mr. Bergeron this summer and
after he joined the Board, they began reviewing their bylaws and they are currently in that process.

It has been asked how there is any control of assessment changes within the Department; what type of review
and audit is being undertaken? So there is a report, it’s called Assessment Audit Report and both Louise Brown
and | have access to that and we run that periodically. | am informed of assessment changes over $20,000.00
as | said, we have these weekly assessor meetings, we discuss large cases. But! also run these audit logs and
| review those and what do they tell me? They tell me the change that’s been made to any building, the change
that’s been made to any land, and the change in total. So if | have questions, if any of those look like | need to
inquire on further information | do and the Assessors walk me through those changes.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 5

You may have heard of a procedure manual that was just introduced to the Board of Assessors in September.
It was reviewed by David Cornell, our Assessing Expert. | stated during the meeting at the Board of Assessors
that this was a live document and it will be amended. So with the new AssessProd5 Software, there will be a
number of changes required and one of the changes that was specified in the Management Audit Report was
the moving away from the EYB or Effective Year Built for depreciation. We brought that up, it was a
recommendation in the Management Audit Report, it is a discussion that we are currently having with Patriot
Properties and it is included in the RFP for the Full Measure & List.

| did not want to undertake changes to a procedure manual when | know that this is going to be addressed in the
Full Measure & List. The current policy is as is, we did not revise the policy for the EYB or for the Grade &
Conditions to the bathrooms and the kitchens; that will be all handled then. We also continue to consult with
David Cornell on best practices and changes will be made to the manual as we find best practices not only
suggested by he but other communities that we are talking with.

We are undergoing rotating attendance at the NH AAO meetings by Assessors. This provides them continuous
education. There is an education portion of those meetings. This part month, Mr. Turgiss and | attended and
the education session was on utility valuation and that was given by Scott Bartlett. So as they hold their
meetings each month, we will rotate the assessors so that all the assessors have a chance to get this
information, bring it back to our weekly assessors meetings and discuss it and share it with all.

We have binders that we have created for the Board of Assessor meetings. Assessing is an interesting function
because it is very paper dependent. There is a large amount of paper that is processed through the Assessing
Department. So you can imagine when you have 40 abatements going to the Board of Assessors for
consideration and it is a bunch of loose papers or papers that are just paper-clipped. They are trying to get
through this big packet and they are trying to have residents join them. We felt that there just needed to be
some organization provided for them to assist them. And also | will admit it assists me in following the meeting
and now we are doing one for the legal representative that is at that meeting as well and one for staff to share. It
does, it has helped very much with the flow and the organization of the meeting. They take relatively little time
to produce. These are also done and used for actually where | got the idea was the Board of Public Works
binders. | think that organization and having a good flow of the meeting is important, especially when it is
televised and we want to make sure that things aren’t omitted or missed. In July when we had all the
abatements was probably when it took the most time to prepare these binders. Normally, half an hour tops to
create these binders for a normal meeting. But they are extremely helpful.

During the Management Audit we discussed the lack of mileage reporting and we had stated back then that this
had already been looked at and had been addressed. This continues, the assessors fill out a mileage report,
they attach their field log, it is required by all assessors; it is reviewed and approved by myself. | also receive all
of the schedules that are created by the Administrative Staff and | can always compare against those schedules
as well.

Property Data Accuracy: By far this is one of the most important things that | could discuss tonight with you. We
have a request for proposals currently out there. That request was posted on August 29". On September 5",
we hold a pre-proposal meeting, this was non-mandatory. We had two firms attend; Vision Government
Solutions and Tyler Technologies. On September 9" was the deadline for any questions to be submitted to the
City and on September 11" we posted any answers to those questions. This Thursday responses are due to
the City by 3:00 P.M. | can tell you to date, as of this morning, none had been received so we are hoping that
everyone is waiting until the last moment. We have put together a team to review the proposals that are
submitted, we are including Purchasing, members of Assessing, CFO Griffin, Director Cummings, Celia
Leonard, to review this proposals.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 6

Then we will choose a couple that we will invite in to speak with us and to rate. Ultimately we hope to have a
decision made as quickly as possible so that we can bring the contract forward to both Finance and to the Board
of Aldermen, considering that is a multi-year endeavor.

| note here again because this is very critical, the EYB, the Effective Year Built. We know there has been a lot
of discussion on this. When CFO Griffin and | conducted the Management Audit, we held meetings with
different assessing experts and we discussed this with the President of Patriot Properties. We let you know at
that time that although the EYB method was used, now back when we installed this software back in the ‘90’s, it
was a commonly used approach. That is not the case now, it is not best practice and we hope that through the
RFP process with the firms getting into as many homes as possible, we will be able to move away from that
Effective Year Built. So it is critical that we get into as many homes as we possibly can. We are going to
provide the public with as much information and make them feel as comfortable as possible. We will also have
members of staff that can answer any questions and we will be using the newsletter to push information on
where they may be concentrating and when so that residents have a heads-up on the areas of the City that the
firm may be in. It has been a long time since the City undergone a Full Measure & List and a revaluation and we
really need to make the best and make sure that this is important data collected for the City.

In April when | came to you | did not recommend an upgrade from AssessPro Classic to AssessProd this
summer. | had actually pushed it out and said that we hoped to do it in 2020; well things change every day in
assessing and what we have found was in order for us to move the exemptions and credits from the ADMIN
System which is the old system which we told we would do this summer. That was not going to be possible with
our current version of AssessPro. That together with the very different information and the highlights and the
benefits that the AssessProd5 version offers, we met with Patriot and they agreed that they could do it. So with
the help of Information Technology, we decided that we would undergo it.

So far, it has been going well. We have completed general training, we are moving on now to more specific
user one-on-one training; so administrative staff needs to know different information than our assessors need to
know. So that would be user specific training. We believe that the benefits of AssessPro5 are going to provide
us with a lot of increased efficiency within the Department. So not only will it provide an abundance of screens
for us to put important data that have been limited in the past, but the AssessProd5 provides for a role based
security which is not current in the AssessPro Classic. So it is important that when you have any system that
your security within the system is really limited to the role that individual plays. So that has been an issue that
AssessPro Classic didn’t address as well as AssessPro5.

You can see there, there’s a number of other benefits; there is the ability for multi-year architecture, meaning
currently we cannot go in and create or enter changes that are for the following tax year. We have to wait until
the present tax year has be rolled and the file has been captured. That may be a series of week that we are not
entering data. This system provides for multi-year where you can actually go in and update a prior year or a
future year depending on what is needed. So that is another important function.

We have, right now, IT is working on a number of projects and they are all inter-related. So not only do we have
the upgrade from AssessPro Classic; we also have within the Building Department and others, a permitting
change from City View to CivicGov. So if you may have noticed up in the auditorium there are computers set up
and staff from the Building Department has been up there training on CivicGov this week. We hear mid-October
they should be up and running completely. That makes changes in the way that the Building Department
communicates with the Assessing Department. So now what IT refers to as a bridge needs to be written
between the AssessProd and the new CivicGov and that needs to be tested and evaluated.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 7

We also have the changes within GIS, so GIS has transferred over to new servers and we have the creation of
the GIS Steering Committee, an adaption of the Strategic Plan that was recommended in the report presented
to you by CDM Smith. So Building, GIS, Assessing, it is a large number of changes occurring, we are very
thankful the IT Department and their support. But there is a lot of testing and a lot of training that is required by
a number of different departments.

On top of all the changes, on top of all the training, what are we currently working on? So this is a list provided
for you of what our administrative staff is currently working on. We are preparing for the MS1 and many of you
may have heard from Finance and Budget meetings that we filed for an extension of the MS1 and our new
deadline is October 11". Of course the AP5 Training & Testing they are continuing an audit of our veteran’s
credits. They are updating AssessPro with BTLA in Superior Court abatement appeals and responding to BTLA
check lists that are required for those appeals. They are processing property transfers and name changes and
filing, everything that is normal within the administrative staff function continues. It has not slowed down; they
provide excellent customer service and | can tell you that I’ve had a number of residents come to me and | am
very, very proud of the customer service that the administrative staff provides. Some of you may have heard
that as well. | was at the DRA in a training last week and | heard it up there from members of the DRA on some
of our staff members and they are really looked at as some of the experts in their field. Quite often they are
called from other communities for questions and answers to things. They also print and process all the monthly
building reports and of course schedule the assessors and complete the data entry when they return. They QC
all of the information that is entered by our assessors.

What are the assessors working on right now? Well you’ve all heard pick up of building permits for file capture
prior to October 11". That’s the number one function right now. They also have a sales qualification that’s
mandatory for the DRA Ratio Study. They provide responses to petitions of the appeals at the Hillsborough
Superior Court and the BTLA. They work very closely with Legal on all of those cases. They answer tax payer’s
requests for inspections and inquires and work on the on-going litigation that | mentioned. They review the
exemptions and the credit applications and sign off on those. They have their own review of the MS1 that is
required and they have their own training for AP5.

So while all of this was happening, we processed in 2019 for 2018 406 abatements. I’m sure as the Board of
Assessor can attest, this kept us quite busy. They had all these appear before them; approved was 171 and
denied was 213, 22 PSNH remain with Legal. They also had a total of 959 exemptions to process. So these
are applications that require a great deal of examination of documents and to make that they have completed all
the information and that they can give a recommendation to the Board of Assessors. We have so far received
to the BTLA 6 residential taxpayer’s appeals and 52 commercial. | think that soeaks somewhat to the success of
the revaluation, when you only have 6 appeals to the BTLA. But that is my own opinion. To Superior Court, we
have 28 commercial currently and that number includes PSNH.

This is a project that we brought to you in April, we talked about how the Assessing Office really needed to
undergo a redesign. This plan was created, it was reviewed by City Buildings and the Risk Department. We will
work towards cost estimates but it was require an RFP. The main purpose is really the Customer Service that
the office provides. So currently the office is not handicapped accessible and neither is there a lot of information
for assisting tax payers at the counter. Some of the information that we discuss during an exemption or an
appeal or a credit is information on income. These residents may not feel comfortable discussing this out in a
general customer service area. So the plan does include creating a couple of cubicles within the conference
room in assessing so that these discussions could be held more privately. Currently they are taking these
residents out into the hallway if they need to sit and review and we would recommend that is probably not best
practice. This will have more information to come but as City Buildings looks at the plan and does some more
measurements and an RFP is put together, we will bring that back.