Board of Aldermen 06-11-2019 Page 22
If you don’t have uniformity, you don’t have equity and fairness in your assessments, it is that simple and it
is that important. You received a letter that was read into the record by Ms. Kleiner regarding a
clarification to a Memo | sent to the Board. | would like to make note of misinformation that she has
provided you. She stated in this letter that AsessPro does not capture all of the work for all of the
properties visited by an Assessor. It only indicates that during a certain time period the Assessor used
AssessPro to make corrections with respect to the listed property. An Assessor typically performs a great
deal more work and makes a great deal more property visits than are captured on this report. She gives
the example that they might be investigating a charitable exemption where the Assessor needs to evaluate
if the building is being used for a qualified charitable purpose. This would not warrant a change to the
property card and is not captured in the report. In fact, that’s not true. There are in this report that was
given to me, three exemptions that were noted in April that this Assessor went to. All exemptions, whether
they are religious or charitable exemptions come in in a form yearly, they have to be submitted to the
Assessor's Office. And it is the clerical staff that handles those forms. They take those forms and they
look at every charity or tax exempt business and they review them. A lot of them are repeats, they are just
coming back and filling out their paperwork every year asking for their exemption, putting it on the record.
There is no need for an Assessor to go visit.
So it’s the clerical staff that actually assigns the Assessor the responsibility to go check these properties.
Many of them are not checked. But when the clerical person received an AY or an Exemption Form for a
new exemption that hasn’t existed before, maybe an exemption that has had a Building Permit, they’ve got
to get out there and check the permit for the exemption. Maybe a property that is no longer to be an
exemption. They are going to go out to it and look at the property card and make certain that it’s all up-to-
date for tax purposes. Those get assigned, and, in fact, our assessor that we are looking at here under a
little bit of scrutiny, was assigned three exemption properties to go to. The Y was one, that’s an exemption
property, he went out there because the new building opened, was asked by the clerical staff “Please go
to the Y on Northeastern Boulevard and check out that new property”. 25 Cornell Road, which is right up
by me is a facility that was going to be used as a parsonage for Tabernacle Church over in Litchfield. It
had not been a parsonage before so the clerical staff said to the assessor, “go out and check on that
ranch-style home as a parsonage”. The third one was 41 and 43 Chandler Street which had been bought
out, that’s the big beautiful church up on Chandler Street that was closed for a while; Catholic Church,
transferred a couple times. It is now under new ownership, it has a big building permit. It has gota
building next to it, a ranch that’s used as a parsonage.
Those properties needed to be checked because there are permits out on them. And, in fact, the clerical
staff wrote a letter, religious exemptions that went to the Board of Assessors on the 29" of April explaining
in this letter very clearly the property at 43 Chandler Street has been used on the A9 Form submitted as a
rectory and is a ranch-style house assessed at 234. This has been exempt and an exemption is being
requested for 2019, according to Commercial Assessor Greg Turgiss at the time of his inspection of the
property last Friday, no one answered the door but he said that it appeared as if it was occupied. Then we
went to the property at 41 Chandler Street, two structures; Mr. Turgiss inspected this property. He
reported it. OK, these are exemption properties and they are, in fact, in the AssessPro report. She is not
recognizing that these exemption properties are captured. And you have to ask yourselves when she
makes note in her letter that there’s a lot of other work that assessors do that may be is not documented in
AssessPro, we need to be very, very concerned. Because | will tell you, there is never a reason for an
assessor to be out at someone’s property, either on it, looking at it, inspecting externally or internally and
not be documenting it on the property card. First of all, you shouldn’t want your people on somebody’s
property where it’s not documented.
But that uniformity and documentation is what is so important on tracking where we are. Now if the
assessor is going to go out to do drive-by, which really shouldn’t happen at all and doesn’t typically, the
assessor is going to do drive-by’s. That should be noted. KRT noted on almost all of the 1401 account,
residential accounts, there’s a note on almost everyone’s property card that says field review. That was
their drive-by. They didn’t really come into your property and do an external inspection or list and
measure. But AssessPro has a lot of codes, a lot of code names for you to go in and document exactly
