Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 6
Then we will choose a couple that we will invite in to speak with us and to rate. Ultimately we hope to have a
decision made as quickly as possible so that we can bring the contract forward to both Finance and to the Board
of Aldermen, considering that is a multi-year endeavor.
| note here again because this is very critical, the EYB, the Effective Year Built. We know there has been a lot
of discussion on this. When CFO Griffin and | conducted the Management Audit, we held meetings with
different assessing experts and we discussed this with the President of Patriot Properties. We let you know at
that time that although the EYB method was used, now back when we installed this software back in the ‘90’s, it
was a commonly used approach. That is not the case now, it is not best practice and we hope that through the
RFP process with the firms getting into as many homes as possible, we will be able to move away from that
Effective Year Built. So it is critical that we get into as many homes as we possibly can. We are going to
provide the public with as much information and make them feel as comfortable as possible. We will also have
members of staff that can answer any questions and we will be using the newsletter to push information on
where they may be concentrating and when so that residents have a heads-up on the areas of the City that the
firm may be in. It has been a long time since the City undergone a Full Measure & List and a revaluation and we
really need to make the best and make sure that this is important data collected for the City.
In April when | came to you | did not recommend an upgrade from AssessPro Classic to AssessProd this
summer. | had actually pushed it out and said that we hoped to do it in 2020; well things change every day in
assessing and what we have found was in order for us to move the exemptions and credits from the ADMIN
System which is the old system which we told we would do this summer. That was not going to be possible with
our current version of AssessPro. That together with the very different information and the highlights and the
benefits that the AssessProd5 version offers, we met with Patriot and they agreed that they could do it. So with
the help of Information Technology, we decided that we would undergo it.
So far, it has been going well. We have completed general training, we are moving on now to more specific
user one-on-one training; so administrative staff needs to know different information than our assessors need to
know. So that would be user specific training. We believe that the benefits of AssessPro5 are going to provide
us with a lot of increased efficiency within the Department. So not only will it provide an abundance of screens
for us to put important data that have been limited in the past, but the AssessProd5 provides for a role based
security which is not current in the AssessPro Classic. So it is important that when you have any system that
your security within the system is really limited to the role that individual plays. So that has been an issue that
AssessPro Classic didn’t address as well as AssessPro5.
You can see there, there’s a number of other benefits; there is the ability for multi-year architecture, meaning
currently we cannot go in and create or enter changes that are for the following tax year. We have to wait until
the present tax year has be rolled and the file has been captured. That may be a series of week that we are not
entering data. This system provides for multi-year where you can actually go in and update a prior year or a
future year depending on what is needed. So that is another important function.
We have, right now, IT is working on a number of projects and they are all inter-related. So not only do we have
the upgrade from AssessPro Classic; we also have within the Building Department and others, a permitting
change from City View to CivicGov. So if you may have noticed up in the auditorium there are computers set up
and staff from the Building Department has been up there training on CivicGov this week. We hear mid-October
they should be up and running completely. That makes changes in the way that the Building Department
communicates with the Assessing Department. So now what IT refers to as a bridge needs to be written
between the AssessProd and the new CivicGov and that needs to be tested and evaluated.
