Special Board of Aldermen 7-14-2020 Page 5
inspection for an abatement, they are performing an inspection for a building permit, it could be a recent
sale that they are qualifying. That activity should always be included in our CAMA System with a date and
the reason for that inspection and that hadn’t always been done. So we issued a directive immediately,
even before Mr. Cornell has finished his audit, as soon as he came to us and said that was one of his
findings.
We talked about developing annual inspection goals, recording every building permit inspection, hiring of
temporary data collectors, which we did back last October. We hired a few data collectors from KRT to
assist us with some building permit. He talked about converting to a table-driven depreciation system;
moving away from the EYB or Effective Year Built, which we certainly discussed here at the Board before.
This has to be done during a Full Measure & List and it has to be done with the issuance of a (inaudible).
And then he talked about updating the data collection manual prior to the Full Measure & List and that’s
important to make sure that when you are going into the Full Measure & List, you are using data collection
procedures the same across the board by all data collectors. And we completed that this past February
with Vision.
So | included his audit summary because | think that this is important because while Mr. Cornell did identify
eight areas where we needed improvement, he also noted that some of his recommendations have been
implemented or already had or will have been implemented in the foreseeable future. We already had
plans in place. We had already identified them in the Management Audit and he did note what we felt was
true, that a lot of the issues within the Assessing Department would be handled by completing that Full
Measure & List and we knew that we were already actively moving in that direction.
The Full Measure & List, you can see, we’ve outlined kind of a timetable for you here. The RFP, that
process was through September. Then we had the review and the interviews of the candidates; we drafted
a contract, we went through a contract process with the New Hampshire DRA who are required to sign off
on the contract. It was February before we got to the Finance Committee with the contract and it was
ultimately approved. Since then | am happy to report that the full revaluation is going very smoothly, very
few complaints and we have had few hiccups with COVID in there, but we had the joint update and Vision,
the New Hampshire DRA, our Board of Assessors held a start-up meeting the beginning of March. And
then they began their data collection and as you can see, a couple weeks later, COVID sprang, which
caused some problems with interior inspections and we needed to amend our contract with Vision for the
safety of our residents and for the safety of Vision’s staff.
We did that and that was immediately approved by the DRA and we suspended our interior inspections,
continued with the exterior inspections and the taking of pictures for the property record cards and that has
continued. We have not resumed interior inspections as of yet.
So because the Full Measure & List was required by the Board of Tax & Land Appeals, the City is required
to file a quarterly update with them and the first update which was filed July 7" was included in your
package and that’s what was sent to the Board of Tax & Land Appeals. As you can see, it is quite
thorough, we really walked through all of the bi-weekly reports that we get from Vision as well as an
accurate timeline of everything that has taken place from March to the end of June.
As you can see here, it is moving quite well, we are about 30% done, this is residential only, they have not
begun commercial as of yet. But the important thing to note here is that they have only had 92 refusals. So
out of over 7,500 measures, they've only had 92 refusals to date and that’s very good. Vision is very
pleased, as are we. We do hold bi-weekly meetings with the City and the Vision Project Team. The project
is on schedule as we said, very few complaints, so that’s the first recommendation by Cornell Consultants.
The second one or actually the 7" one on the list but the second one | want to deal with here, was convert
to the table-driven depreciation system. As | said, you won't see that until 2022 and that’s when Vision will
complete that when they move to that section of the revaluation. And here you can see, we presented this
map when June Perry the Project Lead for Vision came to the Board of Assessors in June and that
YouTube Video is up if you wanted to review her conversation and her update to the Board of Assessors.
