Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 3
Starting in August we introduced the new newsletter, the Assessing Monitor; issued monthly it will provide a lot
of important dates and deadlines, notices of changes and updates within the Department. We want to make
sure that during the Full Measure & List, we can push as much information to our residents as possible. That
has been included in the RFP for the Full Measure & List and will be very important. Residents can sign up for
this newsletter on the web site and they will receive it by e-mail.
Our Board of Assessor meetings; so now our Board of Assessor meetings are held up in the Auditorium, they
are televised on Channel 16, recorded, available on YouTube, minutes are verbatim and available on the web
site. We also created an e-mail address for members of the public to contact the Board of Assessors, that e-
mail address goes to the entire Board and myself in case there is a staff level inquiry that needs to be
investigated for them. Often that address is not for conversation, it is much like the Board of Aldermen e-mail
address. But it does get to the Board and they can view the resident’s inquiry.
Efficiency & Data Collection: One of the problems that came about was you generally had assessors calling
residents and scheduling their own appointments. So as you can imagine in today’s busy society, they would
call, often get the voicemail and they’d have to leave a message and wait for the resident to call them back. The
resident might call them back; they might be in the field. This kind of created a hold up in creating some of
those appointments. So right now we have the Administrative Staff, mostly Ms. Cameron, scheduling those
appointments. And since she is here in the office, you don’t have that telephone tag. And then the assessors
can worry about getting out into the field and completing their appointments.
As | mentioned earlier, the hiring of the temporary employee before you tonight; why is this important? It is
important because we had an increase in our work load, not really anticipate come this September. So as you
may know, we are working with the Legal Department and preparing a response to the BTLA. We are also
working with the Legal Department on a number of appeals that have been filed with the BTLA and Superior
Court. This takes time, it takes Assessor’s time to be in Legal and to walk them through the files and some of
the data. This really arose, otherwise we would have brought this to you much earlier, but we are hoping that
through the NHAAO List Serve and through contacts that we have with other assessors, that we will be able to
fill this position quickly.
We are holding weekly Assessor Meetings; this Monday — yesterday, we had Director Cummings with us from
Economic Development. We are trying to increase the communication with other Departments that may have
information on development within the City. For instance, Director Cummings would have information on
commercial properties and where they may be in their construction process, so to reach out and to make and
use the information and the contacts that we have within the City to the best of our knowledge is important. We
also discuss properties, consistency of methods, and we have a peer review on different properties and
different assessments.
We have re-instituted an updated sales letter, this is a questionnaire that is sent to residents to request and
verify the details of their sale. Over the summer, over 1,179 have been mailed and 304 have been returned.
Why is this important? Well when we are going through the process of qualifying sales, it is important that we
know what information may have been missed on the property card, what information about the sale and the
property they can provide to us. So that is important and we hope that residents will take the time to fill out the
short survey and return it to us.
We also instituted a letter of assessment change. So when a resident has a change in their assessment over
$20,000.00 due to data corrections, we are sending out a letter to inform them. It has been brought to us that
some members of the public would like to see that changed to a percentage, that is something that we are
looking at.
