Special Board of Aldermen 7-14-2020 Page 9
This will be completed by the end of August so it is going to be a snap in to the new system, very different
from how the old system is. It is going to be the same look and feel as staff has and with the ability to look
up the information as was done in the past. Alright, Kim, that’s all that | have.
Director Kleiner
Thank you, Nick. So this was a really large project and one that we could not have gotten completed
without Nick’s help, without that of IT. There was a lot of testing, it went a little longer than we thought but |
have to say that we had to be sure, there was no room for error here, so there was a lot of testing by a lot
of different Assessors and IT and we thank them for that. | am going to move a little quicker, because |
know you have a Full Board of Aldermen Meeting to get to.
Important to note, tomorrow night at Finance Meeting, you will see a contract in front of you for
Consultant/Assessing Supervisor that we hope the Finance Committee will pass. Rex Norman is not
unknown to the City, he worked for us years ago and served on our Board of Assessors and has been the
Chief Assessor for Windham for a number of years. And we believe that while we are still looking for a
Chief Assessor, that search has not stopped, that Mr. Norman will provide us with great technical advice.
Also there were — you know COVID set everyone back a little and some changes needed to be made for
COVID so we had some temporary policies that needed to be implemented for abatements and building
permits and those were approved by our Board. As Nick noted, we are still working on the tablets and we
are going to have our first instructional use with our Assessors this Friday. And then, again, tomorrow night
at Finance you are going to see a contract with Inception Technology. This is for the scanning of all of our
property record files. One thing that we found during the COVID working remote experience was that our
Assessors really needed access to these files. So we are looking at using Docuware Software to make
theses records easily accessible to our staff remotely. So while they are on those tablets and they are
working directly on the CAMA System, they can also pull up a full property record file and have that
information in front of them.
It is important to note and everyone always seems very interested in the number of abatements that we
receive. So for 2019 we are going to see a drop, we had 164 versus the 393 from 2018 which was an
update year. | take this as an indication and that is one that we are happy to see when those abatements
go down.
Moving forward, it has been asked a lot so what do our Assessors do during a Full Revaluation? No, we
don’t get time off. Their workload does not actually decrease. Our Assessors have a lot of required
training for their Certification which we have been holding off on because of the AP5 Upgrade. We needed
all staff in. We had a number of changes as you can see from September's update to this one. So they
need to get out there and get that required Certification. We have Professional Development that we have
lined up both with the NHAAO and then some with IAAO. Some of our Assessors are interested in taking
some appraisal courses and we strongly advise our Assessors to have more professional development and
education as we do all our staff.
We have building modifications coming up, building of a new customer service area including ADA access.
We are going to get some of that Power BI that we talked about earlier, we are all going to learn that and
become experts and we are going to deal with the whole revaluation. We have to monitor the project, we
have to meet with them, we have to provide property record cards, weekly building permits, attend weekly
meetings. The Assessors work with Vision every day of the project.
Then we have to build our cyclical inspection process, we have to develop that so when the Full
Revaluation ends, we have a process of how we are going to ensure that all of our properties are inspected
over a period of time. One of the goals, one of the strong goals from Cornell Consultants that needs to take
place at the end of this reval.
