Board of Aldermen 03-12-2019 Page 26
So our street gets modeled, they come out with all the new assessments in August and then all of a sudden
my husband and | go in and meet with KRT and we ask for our valuation to be lowered to $517,000.00
based on what was on our street; we didn’t use sales data then because we didn’t understand that. We
just looked at all these very comparable homes and we went in and we had the meeting with Ken Rogers,
the President. He offered to come to the house, he recognized the problem with our card, he was the one
who identified the sales chasing issue, thought it was that case and off we went.
The next thing you know we don’t get Ken or anyone from KRT coming to our home, it is in October that |
reach out to KRT and ask why they didn’t come and | found out then that KRT was asked by the City to go
down the street and reevaluate it again. And they picked 5 homes, so in this revaluation no one on the
street knew this was happening. So they pick 5 properties, well they went down the whole street, what |
was told after by CFO Griffin was that Rob Tozier came to my office, | gave him 55 property cards, told him
drive down your street again, this time really look and fix some stuff.
Now when the Mayor told us that KRT came in and looked at every property in this City because they gave
a visual evaluation to everything and built the model, | don’t really agree with that. It was a drive-by, it was
really a feel of the neighborhood, the concept that they looked at every house was really not the case. And
really when you think about it over maybe a four month period, | don’t think they really had the time to look
at every property, 28,000 parcels. It was really about creating a model and using the sales data to create a
model. So they got a feel of neighborhoods | think by driving through, | saw them come through my street
and they were going 10, 15 miles an hour, that’s slow, but still not enough to really be looking at every
house. So | take exception with that. | don’t think they had a good visual on every home. But when they
came down a second time, the goal of that, unknown to any of us on Berkeley Street was to get a good
visual because things weren’t right.
And so they came down and they adjusted 5 properties. And in the process of doing that, they found
another $300,000.00 of valuation that they could raise. And they gave a reason for it, they said, “The first
property we are going to change it from a Grade C to a Grade B because most of the homes on Berkeley
Street are Grade B”. The problem was that there were another 7 homes that were still Grade C and they
didn’t touch those. So out of 55 homes, 48 are Grade B, 7 were Grade C, they change one to up the
assessment $60,000.00 and they don’t look at the others that are Grade C and clearly some of them are
beautiful homes that the Grade had been done 40 years ago and no one changed. So why did they do
that? Why did those homes stay Grade C.
So | looked at that and | said “Well that’s kind of crazy” and then on the other homes they went down 13
Berkeley, 17 Berkeley, 46 Berkeley, 50 Berkeley and they raised them anywhere from $46,000.00 to
$90,000.00 a pretty good hit. And the reasons they noted on those was we’ve got to justify it, they are
being depreciated for unknown renovations. | saw that and | said, “unknown renovations’? How do you
create a valuation for something unknown. And these houses that they raised, these 5 houses, they never
went to the door, they never knocked on the door and said, “Could we come in” or “We want to evaluate
your house”. Well none of these had unknown renovations, they had all had permits pulled that were
improperly or not captured by the Assessing Department. So in my opinion they weren’t unknown at all,
you just go look at the permits, they were done.
So here’s a model that KRT made and they ran this model and they created valuation and then they come
back and they take a really good look and they go, “Hmm, there’s another $300,000.00 over here” and they
change it. And that, to me, | was actually shocked that KRT did that because it put them, in my opinion, in
a very bad position. They should have said to the City of Nashua, “Hey this is your dirty laundry, you didn’t
collect this stuff right, you go back in and knock on the door and get in the house and evaluate this stuff and
fix it, because now we’ve got to throw our model to the wind and go back and do your work”. And the thing
that killed me about their evaluation, the very first home on Berkeley Street, | brought some pictures, it was
where they started, is a very old colonial, that has fallen into disrepair, serious disrepair. So KRT starts
there and sees a house like this, when you see a house that you know you think there are parts of it you
