Board Of Aldermen - Minutes - 9/24/2019 - P8
Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 8
All this work is not a result of just the Assessing Department although they have worked extremely hard. We
have to thank the Mayor for his support; the Board of Assessors; of course all of you. The IT Department has
been instrumental, the Legal Department of course, the Tax Department, CFO Griffin and his Department, Risk
& City Buildings, Mr. Budreau and his staff in HR, Purchasing and Director Cummings in Economic
Development. As | mentioned earlier, David Cornell has provided a wealth of information. | know it has been
stated probably many times before you that | am not an assessor, that is true. But | am fortunate to have good
people around me that have reached out and are providing help to us including David Corner, Patriot
Properties, KRT, Mr. Gagne from Manchester, Mr. Reese from Portsmouth and other assessors. So | have to
thank them for all of their support and | Know that our assessors also help them. This is how the assessing
function has really worked for a number of years; it is a very close knit group throughout the State. They often
rely on each other when they have questions and | would remain that is always best practice.
We have a ways to go, we have continued improvements and efficiency that is going to take place. We want this
to be sustainable change. We know that as new management practices will need to be reinforced and nurtured.
We also know that as we discussed with you back in April, we promised to have the discussion on whether the
Chief Assessor role is one that needs to be explored again. So as we look to the future, there’s going to be a lot
of continued discussion and we hope to bring a lot more back to you and update you. But there are a number of
items that we are still evaluating and we hope that you will bear with us. This is a process. That’s all Madam.
President Wilshire
Thank you Director Kleiner, we appreciate your thoroughness and your presentation and bringing your staff in. |
want to thank them for being here as well. Thank you.
Alderman Klee
Thank you very much. | want to make a statement and then | have one real quick question for you. Today | was
up at the State House, part of my Committee; I’m on a sub-committee to review Veteran’s Tax Credits &
Exemptions. In doing so | spoke with people from the DRA and from the NH Municipal Association and that’s
why | knew you had taken the training with others. But the one thing | want to give a shout out to and that is to
Louise Brown. | was told that the boots on the ground and the expert to give me the information | need resides
right here in Nashua in our own Assessing Department. While she did not know who the counterpart was in
Manchester, Louise was the go-to person that she recommends to everybody. So I’d like to thank Louise for her
work and everything that she does.
The question that | have is when you did that little Assessing 101, one of the things that kind of came out was
our property size went down a little tiny bit. And that was because | think Mr. Turgiss has explained to us that
the State came in and kind of re-did the boundary lines slightly. When you talk about the $20,000.00 of course it
was so tiny it wouldn’t have hit $20,000.00 but is that beyond someone going into assessing, could something
like that happen if we got a correction from the State or anything else or that?
Mr. Kleiner
So currently the letters are being issues if your total assessment has changed more than $20,000.00. It has
been brought up at a Board of Assessor meeting by a resident, could it be a percentage of assessment. That is
a pretty good idea because ideally you could have lower assessed properties with families that a change in their
tax situation may actually affect more. We are going to look at that. What | don’t want to do, is we are moving
to the AssessPro5 and | want to figure out how we can automate these processes.
