Board Of Aldermen - Minutes - 5/28/2019 - P17
Board of Aldermen 05-28-2019 Page 17
When | look at the Commercial Assessor who is in our Assessing Department his mileage is very low,
80, 20, 40, 30, low mileage. The Residential Assessors have much higher mileage going to individual
properties, 175, 150, the month of April our Residential Assessors covered 226 miles because April was
a busy month to gather data. So that’s fine. When | look at this individual who moved into Commercial
Assessing, his mileage is higher than anyone’s, 220, 200, 210, 180. That’s very unusual and when |
saw that in October it was red flag for me. | went and called John Griffin and | said, “I think you have a
fraud problem over here, there’s an issue”. OK? It’s hard to prove, OK, other than giving it to him and |
got the response, “I'll get back to you in a week”. | never heard back from him again. But then | pushed
that aside, because | said, “that’s too big an issue, it’s too hard for me”. Then | started looking at the
property cards more and | started seeing property cards that were so off.
For example, property cards that had visits to homes written in the activity section that were not visited.
So those were potentially mileage charged for properties that were not visited and they could be easily
sat down in a round table with anyone who would want to see them to know, to see how | know that and
how | am able to ascertain that. But! am; there is amethod. So that mileage was very concerning and
it is very interesting to me that in April when Kim Kleiner asked for the field logs to be attached, the
Residential Assessors attach a field log, they go out to 78 homes, they attach 226 miles. The
Commercial Assessor now, who has been charging last month 220 miles, suddenly charges 45, 43; way
down. Guess how many properties they visited in April? The very month that we are the busiest we
could possibly be in Assessing, because we have so many permits to capture, A9’s, exemptions, all this
property work, it went to 7. Seven, that is startling. So the expense and the mileage logs from March
would tell me that this individual had to be out at 100, 150 homes.
But the data, the records don’t support it. And | want you to understand that, that’s the big red flag for
me. How do you go from 200, 220, 280 down to 43? And a busy, busy month? The second thing is we
could look at that and say you know what, there’s a lot of work going on in assessing, this assessor
didn’t go to properties, what is the big thing happening in assessing? Abatements; abatements are huge
right now. Everyone got those abatements divvied up, each assessor got about 90 files they had to
work on. When you look at your Junior Assessor, your Junior Assessor in Assessing, who is not
certified yet | don’t believe, who is in training, since January he has done about 225 pages of
abatements. And they are complete abatements, these are heavy duty sales intensive abatements
where he had to do comps, go out to the homes, take measurements. So there is a lot of work here. |
am going to venture to guess that this Assessor is going to get through 70, 75 abatements, challenging
ones. When | look at our Senior Assessor who is supervisory level, look at the packet, 25 pages. And
what are these abatements? Most of them, well there were 14, actually there are 8 abatements and 6 of
them are fire probations or dilapidated mobile homes that had to be re-evaluated.
President Wilshire
Ms. Ortolano, there is one minute left to our public comment period so if you could start wrapping it up,
I'd appreciate it. Thank you.
Ms. Ortolano Sure, so there’s a big issue and a disparity between why is a Senior Official, a Senior
Supervisor unable to really put a bite into the abatements and take on the ones that are challenging and
get any work done. There are actually no abatements here that required any work at all. Six of the
abatements in here are people who filed after the March 1* deadline. So we had to tear the front sheet
off, stamp a “D” on it and put it in the file and you get credit for work done. That is three minutes of
work, 6 of them out of the 8; that leaves 2 in 5 months. That’s pretty startling, so it is not abatements he
is doing, it is not traveling to properties he is doing and it is not MLS adjusting because | checked that
too. This is where the concern comes in. And as far as morality and demoralizing, | know what that’s
about. And it is demoralizing when you are a hard worker and you are doing your job and you see
somebody who gets breaks like this who doesn’t appear to be. Thank you.
