Board of Aldermen 09-12-2018 Page 4
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja
Yes, | would also like to echo the thank you to the City Clerk and all of the workers. | know it is a long
day and | know some of them were working even prior to the election counting ballots and doing all of
the work so thank you.
Mayor Donchess you mentioned the criteria that was used to determine the property values and | was
asked where someone could find that information. Is it posted anywhere on line?
Mayor Donchess
There are so-called property cards, it is now an online record but it used to be on a card, so it’s called a
property card. You can see the property card for each property on line and get the basic information.
But of course the most basic criteria are how large the house is, what neighborhood it is, how many
square feet, how many rooms. But deeper than that you have questions of the grade of the property,
which has to do with the quality of the construction, there is a depreciation factor which includes a
couple of kind of subsets, one of which is condition, average over good, excellent, based upon the
improvements and the quality of the improvements that are made. Each house and each room can
have a different condition, the kitchen might be average, the bathroom upstairs might be excellent.
Also they often estimate the year, the affected built year, in another words if a house was built in 1920
but got upgraded to kind of 1960 standard, now that is also looked at together to determine by the
assessor. That’s why | am saying it is hard for us as lay people who don’t have training to get into all
that and try to decide how all those factors work together and how that should come out. | mean some
people have raised the issue of — well somebody got a building permit and the value wasn’t upgraded.
Sometimes that is a mistake in analysis, sometimes other things came into play.
So the point is that | have tried to answer what some of these criteria are, but the point is that we
cannot and should not, in my opinion, ever get into trying to decide how this all applies to one house,
because that’s why we have the Board of Assessors, that’s why we have the KRT, that’s why we have
these professional people. That's why we have the Board of Land & Tax Appeals and everything else,
because we want to keep the thing based upon the merits, the facts and not make it look like, which we
would never try to unfairly do anything, | know. But we don’t want to make it look like the Aldermen are
getting into or the Mayor is getting into in deciding for his or her friends, who gets what. We don’t want
that, we want it to seem and we want to be, which is it is and also appear, to be totally on the up and
up.
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja
Thank you and the reason that | ask this is because | have been asked by people, well how do |
prepare to go in and talk to them, | don’t have any sense of how they even arrived at this decision. So |
will tell them to look at our minutes from tonight and they will at least have asense. The people that
have talked to me have said — | could go in and talk to them but | don’t even know what kind of facts to
bring.
Mayor Donchess
Well | think the KRT people are very .. this meeting process is very informal. You go in, | mean | haven’t
done it, but people go in and talk with them. Give them what you have, you know, maybe there is a
sale from a few years ago, maybe there is an appraisal from a bank, maybe you look at the property
card and it says you’ve got 4 bedrooms and you’ve got 3. Maybe you took out the swimming pool last
year, you know something. Whatever you think, maybe you haven't done anything to the house in the
last 70 years. Whatever the person thinks might be reflected unfairly, go talk to them and they will
respond to you and then they will follow up if you wish.
