Board of Aldermen 1-28-2020 Page 9
O-20-004
Endorsers: Alderman Thomas Lopez
Alderman Patricia Klee
Alderwoman-at-Large Shoshanna Kelly
Alderman Linda Harriott-Gathright
ALLOWING PERMITTED OVERNIGHT ON-STREET PARKING ON EIGHTH STREET
Given its first reading; assigned to the COMMITTEE ON INFRASTRUCTURE by President Wilshire
PERIOD FOR GENERAL PUBLIC COMMENT
Lori Ortolano 41 Berkeley Street. | just wanted to share a couple of comments with you. We saw the
report had come out in the paper regarding the Police Investigation getting released. Part of that
investigation had to do with this change that made on property record cards that amounted to a $24 million
dollar reduction on a group of cards. That raised a number of issues because of how that communication
was handled on those cards. The difficulty was the administration, Ms. Kleiner wasn’t forthright on why
those changes were made, which is what pushed it out into an outside investigation.
But my concern is this, that change was done because we changed table data in the AssesPro System.
Tabled data is what changes a group of properties that are coded as a group in that table. So essentially
what you are doing is a mini-reassessment on a group of properties. That is allowed outside of a big
update year, like KRT Appraisal coming in; we are allowed to do these mini-re-assessments. However, |
am very concerned that these mini-reassessments are being done outside of the knowledge of the Board of
Assessors. They don’t approve these changes which is actually shocking to me because they are the
oversight Board for approving changes in large scale assessments and the other area is in abatements,
when abatements come forward.
When we do a KRT or an update, we get all this data that pours out to the public. The public understands
what went on and we can access a lot of information. When a property owner files an abatement, it is a
very public document. Every property owner or every resident of this City can go down to Assessing, pull
the abatement file, see who filed, see what sales comp they used or what data corrections they wanted,
see what appraisal was put in. They can follow the whole process. The assessor who did the analysis, the
analysis done by the assessor and then the action of the Board of Assessors on that property. So we have
this huge public trail that is available that explains to us how a new assessment was arrived at; or perhaps
it was denied and it stayed the same.
When assessors in the office make a table data change and they change a large group of properties and
there’s no documentation done as was the case with this property, that becomes a major concern to me.
And that was what raised the red flag. So you know, | would love to see a policy change in our Board of
Assessors, where they are receiving this information when table data is changed in the model. And it
comes down to the Board so that they are reviewing the group of properties that are receiving this
reduction; in this case it was a $24 million dollar reduction. | think that’s worthy of going to the Board.
Just in the last few weeks, | stumbled on some properties by my house, because as all of you know I’m in
an abatement issue and there was a change made to a group of properties. Each property was cut
$100,000.00. One of them has already been abated by July 1*', it was abated. In October, an assessor
down there, cut it another $100,000.00. | happened to catch it, just by luck. | wrote my questions, said
“how did this happen’. I’m in the same situation | was 16 months ago. | don’t know, there’s no
documentation, | have to do research. Now the new director had said to us months ago, everything is
going to be documented, we are going to document from now on. There’s really no document trail.