Board of Aldermen 07-09-2019 Page 13
to the assessors each month. And yearly we run a single report; and one of them | can’t remember which
one is excel format. So then | scratch my head learning that last week and saying why don’t | get an XL
formatted report. I’ve sort of complained to you guys that these PDF files are brutal to work with and you
can’t do anything with the data. So if the administration has data in Excel form, send it to us that way. Don’t
lock us down with data that is useless.
| received an AssessPro Activity report that was able to show me what was happening with visits to
property, permits, abatements, all that kind of stuff, super helpful. | was able to get work logs and mileage
reimbursement reports. Last week | had been trying to figure out what happened when KRT had the
meeting and all these people came out in their Wards to say we want you to come see our house again. So
we all got our letters at the end of August with the initial re-evaluation data. Then KRT set up these little
meetings to allow people to come up to express concerns and you could ask for them to send somebody
else out. | wanted to know how values were changed the second time around but with our contract with
KRT we never asked for that data and we never captured what happened the second time around. | was
interested in that and | was led to believe that there were really not many changes that there were you
know 300 people who came to those meetings in total. There weren’t that many changes. So | wrote a
Right to Know to ask, what | figured is they must’ve sent a second letter out after the first letter when they
did a final change, because | got one. | was one of those people who went and said look at my house
again. In October | got a letter, so | said OH anyone who went out got a new letter in October. Well sure
enough they did so | did a Right to Know request and | said send me all the letters you sent out in October
for the second look. It was 1,252; that was a lot more than | thought, that’s a lot of data in the second
review.
Now granted for all the parcels we have maybe that’s only about 5% but it was a lot of data. | will tell you
what concerns me about this data having gone through it is that KRT used 2017 values that must’ve been
given to them by the City. When | take these 1,252 letters and put them into a spread sheet that is
workable and | combined it with a data disc, data spread sheet data in City Hall, the 2017 values that we
have on our records do not match the data that we gave KRT. And it really concerns me; something went
awry for some of these properties. | don’t know why. And out of the 1,252, 12% of the data was not correct,
that’s a lot. So now | am sitting here looking at data where the baseline given to KRT does not match our
records. What | did observe for sure was that properties that were MLS corrected, let’s say a property sold
in 2017 and it was corrected by MLS data for the December tax bill of 2017. That was never put into the
KRT Assessment, re-evaluation, it didn’t get in there. So properties that may have had, some of them had
changes they had sold, they had been valued at $150 and they sold for $275. So when the Assessor
corrected it, they made a more aggressive correction because the property had had a lot of upgrades.
That’s great: but that never got put into the KRT data and to me that is a significant issue.
| have typed a question into assessing, the General Help Line to ask you know how did this happen and
why is this so confusing where is the mix up? But to me there is a question there. That’s pretty important.
So the reports have all served a purpose and they served a purpose because some of you here really felt
that this whole issue with a certain assessor was my responsibility to find the data, to establish proof, to
look at work performance and to grab it all. | don’t feel that was ever correct; | feel the City had a
responsibility and | don’t think the City followed its responsibility the way it should have. | think the
investigation going on right now is far too narrow. But these requests gleaned a lot. And | came to you a
few meetings ago and | spoke pretty directly about abatements not getting done; certain people not
carrying their load. | can tell you after that meeting that individual did 20 abatements in a month. Imagine if
they had done that for the five other months what we would have had. Hey that is impressive, light a fire,
get a response. You shouldn’t have to light a fire, but it got a response.
The work logs, the reason | pulled work logs and | pulled the e-mails of this assessor, because the work
logs which were not well documented relative to other assessors. The work logs were really incomplete;
but the one thing noted in the work logs repeatedly was that they respond to taxpayer e-mails often. |
thought how many taxpayer e-mails come in. | checked with the Assess Help E-mail and | was told hardly
any. But then each assessor has their own personal business e-mail address that they can give out so
they could have their own business e-mails. So what did | do? | did a Right to Know for the e-mails. Do
