Special Bd. of Aldermen — 02/27/2017 Page 14
Alderman Jette
Just to reassure property owners, the fact that someone’s house may have increased in value doesn’t
necessarily mean that their taxes would go up as a result of that. Am | not correct about that?
Mayor Donchess
That’s generally correct because everybody’s have gone up in value. The difficulty that | tried to explain at the
beginning is again in generally at least these preliminary equalization ratios based upon smaller number of
sales suggest that commercial will not go up as much as residential and therefore there will be some impact.
In other words to translate oh my house is up 25 percent therefore my taxes are going to up 25 percent, that is
not the case. Everybody’s property is going up as well. If all properties went up the same amount, there would
be no change in the distribution of the tax burden.
President McCarthy
| think we can say is if a property has not appreciated in value more than the commercial properties, your taxes
will actually go down because the taxes are going to go down. There’s a number somewhere just above that
that’s the breakeven point. If your property values have gone up approximately the same as the other
residential properties, then taxes will go up because of the way equalization works.
Mayor Donchess
Again by working with KRT by trying to capture all commercial values, we hope to mitigate the shift from
residential to commercial as a result of the rapid escalation of residential house home values.
President McCarthy
Other questions? Thank you very much.
Mayor Donchess
So we will be bringing a contract to finance at some point in the very near future. CERF money is already
appropriated so we'll come to finance with the contract. We're going to go to finance on the 21%.
Alderman Jette
I’m sorry | didn’t think of this before. So have other companies that do this same type of work have we sought
bids from other companies?
Mr. Griffin
On the commercial and industrial side, we had some discussions with an individual that specializes in
commercial/industrial. He was just overloaded. He could not perform the work. With regard to, and the Mayor
alluded to this, we use a Patriot AssessPro system that’s used by five communities in the State of New
Hampshire. So we're limited on the amount of folks that know the Patriot System and that’s KRT. Most of the
cities and towns use Vision Software. There’s probably many more but as far as my knowledge is there’s two
major camera systems to collect the data so we were limited to these folks.
One final point Mayor which is important, the company that creates the AssessPro software is not certified to
perform mass appraisal work in New Hampshire. They are predominately Massachusetts and Connecticut.
