Board of Aldermen 11-13-2018 Page 16
these gaps and why do we have such wide variability and what are we going to do to try to prevent this
from happening in the future. | know that part of the gap is caused by how we handle new sales, how
we handle sales when we do an assessment, how we handle the capture of MLS data when we use
those pictures to try and prove the property cards and bring them up to better valuation and how we are
capturing these permits; where this data is coming from as far as the calculation of the permits to
determine valuation when we change those cards. They all play a factor.
What you find is that the sales data seems to be the strongest data to work with, it makes total sense, it
is what our assessor KRT uses, it is what we try to use. The sales data is the hard data. But what
happens is if you are one of those homes that has pulled permits, even had the permits captured, the
valuation or not had permits captured, the valuation on the permits is so low that you end up sliding
down and staying in the low level valuations for long periods of time and a house that sells gets
corrected usually pretty well, certainly when it is used in the sales cycle, it is up there nice and high with
the sales data where it sold at and all of these other homes tend to be sleepers. We are not closing the
gap, we are not catching up on these homes that are under permit work and using the MLS verification
data. They are just staying too low.
We have had some exchanges, | have had with Steve and | know the City Counsel put a quote in the
paper about the complexities of all this stuff. | think it is not as complicated for what is going on in the
City as we may want to think it is. My observations in the Assessing Office is you have an attendance
issue. You have to have a manager who is at work, it just has to happen. And that is a big issue, I’m
aware of it and | am pretty certain that management is aware of it. Somebody has got to be at the
helm.
The other issue is not all assessors are experienced equally. Wwe have some seasoned assessors and
we have some assessors that are very new at this, I’m talking just a couple of years. My observation
when | look at these property cards is a younger assessor is struggling to make the right decisions and
there doesn’t appear to be any oversight to assist in that. One case of that | can share with you
happens to be a house in my neighborhood that has been under probably 6 or 7 permits in the last 8
years. The owner is very wise to never let the assessor in, to deny entry all the time. The house has
slid under value tremendously. It is probably $150,000.00 under value; when the less experienced
assessor goes to the home to try and get in and is denied, the homeowner simply says, “Just to let you
know my kitchen now is average, no longer good and the bathroom | did 4 years ago is no longer good
it is average, and everything should be changed to average”. And the assessor changes all the data to
average. Why are we doing that? The property owner should not be standing at the door telling the
assessor what grade to put on their stuff, otherwise, we can all just send our card in with a mark up and
say, “here is how we view it, here’s what it is going to be”. That is a problem and that is just an
experience problem.
The same assessor visited an expensive property and the owner said, “I’m valued too high | just think |
need to come down” and the assessor said, “Sure | agree” wrote in the notes, “Il took him down”, took
him down pretty good. KRT rolls in the next year, this was 2017, takes them up a couple hundred
thousand, | don’t think down was the way it needed to go at all. But nobody is reviewing that either, that
is aproblem. That assessor is visiting homes where if they don’t get in or get a response at all, they
are closing the permit, walking away and assigning no value at all. That is what creates these issues
with permits when it comes to equalizing out their valuations. We clearly are struggling with that.
The other thing | did this weekend and what | hadn’t thought about, all this MLS data that is on-line, |
started realizing | can go and pull up pictures of houses and | can actually see what the kitchens and
the bathrooms look like. | can lay out pictures and look at the property cards and say, “what did the
assessor rate that as”. And | can tell you | pulled up 3 kitchens in my neighborhood, one a 1970
linoleum Formica kitchen, pretty disastrous, really needed a lot of work, got an average rating. The
house next to it was a 2005 kitchen, very open, nice countertop, white cabinetry, pretty nice-looking
kitchen got an average rating. The third kitchen is a flipping, drop-dead gorgeous granite counter top,
