people that run a competent assessing office. We don't have a software problem, we have a
people problem.
Ms. Kleiner seemed to present this as an immediate need to couple with the new Vision assessment
numbers due to be released at the end of August 2022. If the Board hurries up and passes this, the
tool should be ready by August. Nashua's history with software tools and upgrades within the
Assessing office would show significant delays and problems with the delivery of services.
[1] The Patriot software upgrade approved in 2019, was supposed to be running in a matter of
months. By November 2020, property record cards were still not online for the 2020 abatement tax
year and citizens had to go to City Hall to access data as home access was not available. Prior to
this, the next year's property record cards were always updated and available in November, with
November 2019 representing the first year that home access was available. In the fall of 2020,
citizens were still finding errors on the property record cards and data fields missing, which
required additional troubleshooting.
[2] The property record cards were again not available for home access in November 2021 to
coincide with abatement season due to undisclosed software issues. This software problem
coincided at the time the assessing office was under construction so citizens could only email in
requests for property record cards.
[3] The Inception Technology digital scanning project approved in July 2020 was supposed to be
completed in about a year. It was presented to the Finance Committee with a total cost of $60K, but
we now know the scanning costs are approximately $100K. And we need to dedicate staff or hire
staff to review and redact 900,000 pages of documents before they come online. This could easily
drive the cost of this project up to $250K.
[4] The public was never told that OUR public records were going to be inaccessible for years with
no way of easily knowing what files are inhouse and what files are out of house.
[5] The $20,000 Cornell Dashboard, taxpayers funded, was late in delivery and was not user
friendly only because the city offered no documentation on the interface or a simple training video.
When the Dashboard went live, I emailed Ms. Kleiner and asked if the assessors had been trained
on using the tool. Ms. Kleiner responded that the staff had training. When I requested to meet with
an assessor to get a quick training tutorial, I was denied a meeting, even just a phone call, with an
assessor. And as you can see above, Ms. Kleiner appears to have received more compliments than
complaints on the new platform. Apparently, I was just showing my age. (see my attached email
exchange in Oct 2020.)
[6] In 2019, the City spent about $6,000 on new tablets for the assessor to take into the field to visit
properties and capture data electronically that can be directly coupled to the Patriot Assessing
software. These are largely unused because Vision took over all property reviews in 2020 and is
performing the inspections, the permit capture and sales reviews. Our assessors are not doing this
work. It was a waste of money to buy tablets in 2019.
