Board of Aldermen 11-12-2019 Page 13
They didn’t knock on the door, they didn’t ask to go in, they didn’t ask to look at the properties. They took 5
properties that they said | identified and they raised them $350,000.00. They credit me with that maneuver,
they said “Wow Laurie, you’re so good at this, you nailed it, these houses aren’t right”. And while | may not
be an assessor and | may not be qualified, it is amazing to me how they put that on me and said “you did
the job that we needed to do, thank you”. That has proceeded to happen.
| think Ms. Leonard should be very careful about dissing the public and our qualifications because we have
an acting manager right now that is no more qualified than | am. And that has been a great source of
problem. Now one of the items that she highlighted to the BTLA was the fact that we were cherry picking.
We were cherry picking data and making it look bad when really it just represents a little bit of data. Well |
really didn’t cherry pick, | lived in a north end neighborhood and | looked at every street up there and then
branched out into other neighborhoods. What | find interesting is our past Chief two ago, Angelo Marino, is
that this name, | can’t remember, Angelo Marino. He was very much into neighborhood assessing. That
was his technique was, | guess to cherry pick throughout the City. So | started off doing that myself
because | was familiar with my neighborhood, but | looked at all the properties, | looked at 300 or 400
properties. | didn’t look at just 5 or 6 on my street, | looked at the whole north end, that’s how | ended up
discovering the Mayor’s property card.
In this Hearing Document that went to the BTLA, my issue with the Mayor’s property card had always been
that the permit was never captured in a timely manner. It was opened in 2007, it was taxed in 2012. There
was one visit in 2008 that didn’t gain entry and the assessor put no value on the permit. And the assessor
did not go to the property during the Annual List Timeframe, by April 1°. The assessor shows up a year
later in September and misses the April 1*' deadline to assess the permit; doesn’t get in, doesn’t go back,
doesn’t call, goes back 3 years later, again after the annual list of April 1*' when we should be capturing
permits, goes again in September. Then he captures the permit but it is too late to assess it in 2011
because the tax bill is closing within a month. He taxes that property in 2012. It took 5 years to put value
on that property and that is a text book example of a property mismanaged. And when the assessor goes
in he makes a determination on the card that he is going to change the EYB to 1985. But he gets back to
the office and he only changes it to 1970, 15 years less. It was 1959, so he raises it 11 years. Ms.
Leonard points out that EYB is subjective, it is. We have a huge problem with how subjective we have
been using that.
What makes one assessor determine that a house that has had the walls ripped down, the wiring and
plumbing done, new sheetrock put up, new kitchens, baths, built-in cabinetry and basically a total remodel
moved 11 years. Other houses that didn’t even do that moved 30; what is the difference on your tax bill?
On the Mayor’s tax bill it would have been $50,000.00. On my tax bill it was $160,000.00. She blows all of
that off and uses his property card in here to site as a job well done. That's when | lose faith. | lose faith
that we don’t take ownership for our mistakes; that we don’t recognize that we have done some things
wrong and we need to change the way we do those things. So reading that document that she sent to the
BTLA was wholeheartedly disappointing a week ago.
But a month ago, | started a data dig and it was interesting to me when she said | cherry pick; | don’t look at
enough data. | hadn’t read this document. | decided that | am going to take all of the sales data from
October of 2015 until KRT took the sales data of April 1°", 2017. | am taking 19 months of sales data, and |
am running a sales report and | am going to make a spread sheet. | am going to go in and | am going to
pull every property card up and | am going to pull every MLS up and | am going to look at all the qualified
sales and | am going to look at every picture and | am going to see what our assessors saw.
| created a spreadsheet of 10,000 data points, this was hand scraping, and this is why | tell you that | want
data on-line. So | scraped this data, | put it together, and | find out exactly what is going on when they
sales adjust property. Over that 19 month period, 27 homes were adjusted with their EYB. The sales guys,
the assessors looked at the data and they were very nicely done, they deserved to be adjusted. They had
a total value of $8.7 million of property sales; 27 homes. The assessors increased the assessment value
by $1.12 million. Those 27 homes saw, on average, a $2,000.00 increase in their tax bill for 2016 and 2017
until KRT came in and equalized.
