Board of Aldermen 10-08-2019 Page 7
Why are we not taking an initiative to pay a single fee for a year and pay the $50,000.00 or $70,000.00 and
create scanned records of all of these files? So that when the public, like me, wants to access a file, we
are not hearing that, “OH it is going to take us 5 days” and they’ve get to check it and inspect it and it is too
much work and you are creating a big burden. Why aren’t we looking at ways to create records that are
accessible, that are open access the way they should be? It is almost 2020.
Right now | attended a class and the gentleman who is the Chief up in Goffstown, Scott Bartlett wno heads
the NHAAO, he was talking about his records. Up there they keep their property files and their income data
separate. So if somebody wants to come in and get a property file, you can just get it, it doesn’t have to be
checked. Down in Nashua, we combine the income data in the property file, which doesn’t affect all files, it
only affects files, mostly commercial that have income data. But the staff has to quickly go through them to
remove income data if that’s the type of file you have. Now it is not an overly, timely job; certainly for the
files ve requested, they've really all been thinner files because | haven’t done a lot of work in commercial
file access. Those files get very thick and take more time. But if you scanned and had a person come in
and scan your records you would have, you could separate out the income data, you would have them all
scanned. The public could come in like me, and go to the computer in the office and just pull up the files
I’m interested in looking at. And if | wanted them from home, maybe you can’t make that accessible
outside to the home, but then the office could easily send you the e-mail within 2 minutes with the files
attached. It would be no work at all. And then as data gets added to files, they are not photocopying and
running to a vault and stuffing pages into the files; they are just scanning and throwing the electronic record
it which is frankly a lot easier.
So when we hear from management that Assessing is a paper intensive job; it doesn’t have to be. | think if
this City talks about wanting to have the best Assessing Office in the State, then make it so we can access
the records, because we can’t really do it. Now | put in a request through Legal to access Buyer/Seller and
Real Estate Agent letters, Broker letters that were sent out to verify the sales data from KRT. We were told
by the Administration that our Assessors verified all the sales data for KRT, which turned out not to be true,
we never did that job to the level we were supposed to. But that these letters were sent out to verify the
sales; | wanted to see the letters to know if we did it. So | put in a Right To Know. The response back form
Legal is, “Ok that’s over 1,000 files, really 1,200, it is going to take 4 years for us to get that to you”. Is that
reasonable to tell the public you have to wait 4 years; that it is a 4-year process to access that data? Why
aren’t they just scanned in a file. And that wasn’t a big request; that was just for a letter that would on the
top of the file; that wasn’t for them to go through the whole file, take out income data or do something
intensive. Four years to access a single letter. That is absurd that that was the type of response | got. |
don’t think this Chamber in this horseshoe is doing enough to look at how we access data and how we
want that office set up to access data.
At the last meeting we heard management talk about, you know, putting together the binders. We do 7
binders now that we give out to the Board of Assessors and other people who come. And we heard
management say, “It really doesn’t take much time, it’s not that intensive it doesn't, it is very simple”. |
disagree wholeheartedly and I’d wished you spoke to the person who did it for months. The time it takes is
a function of what time of year it is. If it is March, April, May, June, July we are dealing with heavy
abatement stuff, the paperwork for the Board of Assessor’s meeting is enormous, an enormous amount of
paperwork. The binders going out were 200 to 250 pages a book. So you are doing 7 books, you are
putting out 1,400 to 1,700 pages that you are photocopying downstairs to put these books together. That’s
time intensive, | don’t know why management is telling you “that’s easy”. It isn’t, that took a lot of staff time.
And you know what disturbs me more? They worked their butt off for a week to put the binder together, the
meeting is on Thursday, all the books come back to Assessing Thursday after a meeting and they throw it
all in the trash and they start printing for the next meeting. You throw away 1,400 to 1,700 pages every
other week. All that printing cost, that’s enormous; you are the green people. You know, be green, don’t
allow us to do that kind of copying and create that kind of waste. Go electronic, have them bring in a
notebook computer. | don’t print mine, | bring my notebook in and | scroll through, you know, on my
screen, download it because | don’t want to carry 250 pages and flip through it. And | just put it there so |
can have it to access.
