Special Bd. of Aldermen — 02/27/2017 Page 10
Alderman O’Brien
Thank you Mr. President. I’m looking at page 12 and one of the things is conduct informal hearings after you
get done with your evaluation. Can you touch base and just expand on that what the average taxpayer if he’s
in conflict with what you came up with with the evaluation. Can you just go over so that the public could know
what the process is, what is the hearing type of about so that they can understand what we're trying to do here
please?
Ken Rodgers
Sure. They can come in. We'll go through their property record card to make sure that there is no
discrepancies with the data. We can explain how the values is arrived. If they have comparable sales or what
they feel are comparable, they can bring those 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’s those things that we can
look at. We do put together to a taxpayer a little mini manual and explains the whole process and how we
develop the values. How the neighborhoods were delineated. It gets into pretty good detail.
Alderman Dowd
There have been instances on trying to equate home values if you’re looking at a particular type of house in a
development and they all look alike to give them all the same valuation would be wrong because some of them
may have a finished basement or other amenities that are all on the inside that make the value of the house
higher. Does that normally cause conflict or do you have ways around that?
Ken Rodgers
Well we’re using the existing city’s data as far as the interior information. So if there is a finished basement
and it’s on the property record card, it will get valued. That’s probably the biggest difference of doing a full
revaluation where we’re inspecting every property versus doing a statistical where we're really just looking at
sales and then using the existing data.
Mayor Donchess
And that’s one reason why we had requested the DRA that we be allowed to take more time and do the
physical inspection because if there is somebody who had done work without a permit or something, we don’t
know that and that’s not reflected in the property description and therefore not reflected in the value. DRA
wants us to do this now. They don’t want to wait to get a more complete job. They’re willing to go to litigation
to try to force us to do this immediately.
Alderman Jette
So if doing this complete re-evaluation — | forget what you called it...
Ken Rodgers
We're doing a statistical revaluation but there’s a full revaluation which is measuring and listing every property.
Alderman Jette
Okay so if measuring and listing every property is a better way of determining what the value of property is and
what we're really looking at is how do properties compare in value to each other so that as the money we raise
for taxes is spread among all of these properties it’s done fairly. If that’s the better way of doing it even though
