Board of Aldermen 2-25-2020 Page 18
The President of the Company told the Board, “sure they come in, we go through their property record card
to make sure that there is no discrepancy with the data. We can explain how the value is arrived. If they
have comparable sales or what they feel are comparable, they can bring in and show them to us or
comparable assessments. If there are neighbors that have very similar houses and their values are very
different, it is those things that we can look at. So we do put together, for the tax payer, a little mini-manual
and we explain the whole process on how we develop the values, how the neighborhoods were
delineated”. It gets into pretty good detail.
Now anyone of you, if you went out and attended that informal Hearing, none of that happened. And that
was a bone of contention with me. First of all, we didn’t even know we were supposed to bring our property
record cards. The letter that was mailed to the home owners about these hearings never said, “get your
property record card”. Property record cards weren't on-line so unless you called City Hall and said, and
there were 2,050 people that went to these second hearings, most of them represented residential property
owners in each Ward. So that was roughly 5% of the residential property owners that came out. So if each
one of them didn’t call the Assessing Office and say, “Print my card and leave it over at the meeting for me
when | come out’, you were really lead to believe, or you would have been led to believe as an Alderman
seating here, that there would have been a computer there or the appraisers at the meeting would have
had access to a computer screen to pull up your property record card to go over it with you.
In fact, none of that was available. And this concept that they provided a little mini-manual or delineated
how these assessments were done was absolutely false and that was a big issue for us. What they did is
sit there and tells you, “we created a very sophisticated model, our model is very powerful’. That’s exactly
what they told residents during the abatement process who came in to talk about the abatements last
summer, June. We have a powerful model. That’s not compliant with the State rules on addressing
assessments and level of assessment.
As a matter of fact, IAAO and the State calls it out specifically says, “Never say we have a powerful model’,
because the taxpayer doesn’t understand that and they don’t have access to the model. You have to go to
a fee appraisal basis and you have to present properties within the neighborhood and show them that this
really is in line with what they think it should be. That’s what we know and that never happened. And no
one called them on that. So | appreciated the Alderman who addressed it, but | think this time around we
have to hold them, Vision when they come in, accountable in these informal hearings to value, defend and
justify the information that they are giving to us. And if they say they are going to provide us with mini-
manuals and explain the assessments in our neighborhoods to justify our values, then by God do it.
Because we walked away with nothing and we walked away from an abating process with nothing; two
rounds of it. They proved nothing. “We have a powerful model”.
There was something else | wanted to raise and | didn’t write it down. | can’t recall. So we will end it on
that. But | hope, | don’t know if Vision is going to come to this Board; | hope when they do, you ask a lot of
questions. Because of each one of you represents a Ward and | think that the property owners within that
Ward will all be stepping through this process. Oh | know what | wanted to raise, | am concerned and | have
written this in e-mails before to the City that in the next go-around, because our property cards have a lot of
questionable data on them, especially with the depreciation code. You are going to see properties that get
adjusted and changed significantly and | am really concerned and have been since the beginning of this
process that we are going to slam property owners with very high increases, because their properties just
weren't valued correctly, basically since the recession. We never quite got the right correction in after 2008
and we have moved this market up really heavily.
| even have a girlfriend who lives in New Jersey and they did an assessment down in her town and the
values came in very high; the City went nuts. They re-set everything back to the old value, they re-did it
again and then they decided to do a Phase-In over 3 years. People who saw increases above a certain
amount were given the increase incrementally placed in their property tax bill over a 3-year period to phase
it in to get this correction made.
