Board of Aldermen 06-11-2019 Page 23
what you are doing when you look at a property. It is always documented. Now when | saw this letter
which was just in the last day, | said, “Hmmm, am | wrong, did | really give the wrong information”. Well let
me look at the residential assessors that went out to 79 properties in April. Well when | look at that
AssessPro report she gave me; excuse me it was 89 properties they went to. When | added up the
properties, it came out to 92. That’s pretty accurate, OK? They missed 3 that they should have
expensed, but they didn’t overcharge and pretty much it’s a pretty accurate report.
When | look at the other commercial assessor and the properties that he went to versus the expense
report, it is off by a couple properties, pretty accurate. Some of them, because he was at a building that
had 6 units that he was inspecting in the same building, it’s not 6 trips, it appears 6 times because it’s unit
12, unit 14, unit 16, unit 18. But you are literally going door-to-door looking at new properties. And that’s
how it is done; itis pretty darn accurate. But when | look at another assessor report and | am still trying to
find 500 or 600 miles, that’s when | see a red flag. And if Ms. Kleiner is saying that this assessor is driven
around, he’s just driving around, and you don’t realize he’s doing a lot of work but none of it is
documented. Then | want to ask you to ask your administration, how do we monitor fraud, waste and
mismanagement if we allow this to go on? How do you know you don’t have a fraud, waste, and
mismanagement process? If you are allowing this to happen and there’s no documentation? That's never
supposed to happen. And so the other thing she notes in here is that they are only doing a peer review
process in there. Mr. Turgiss isn’t operating as a supervisor at all; | disagree with that for a number of
reasons. She’s not down there daily; but they operate on peer review.
Now the two residential assessors are doing peer review work. That is very apparent to me looking at the
logs and the data and everything. But the commercial assessors are not. And | want to know why. The
most experienced assessor in there is a Certified Appraiser and has done probably 20 years of
Commercial Assessing, which is a different beast from residential. You have different income statements
and different approaches to take to value commercial properties. They are trickier and more difficult to do
because you don’t have a lot of data in a single category sometimes to assess these properties. So they
are unique creatures. So we have one commercial assessor that has 20 years of experience and is a
licensed appraiser. Our other commercial assessor, in question here, has only been at it 3 years and
does not have a lot of experience. Why is there no peer review going on here? Why isn’t the experienced
one doing the peer review, what is happening here? | think | have an answer to that, but I’m not going to
share that right now. Let’s see what the administration says. But that is not happening and that is a very
good question why we don’t do that monitoring.
When | looked at again Ms. Kleiner’s letter | thought to myself “well maybe | don’t understand, maybe |
missed what these assessors are dong”. So | went back to the presentation that was given to you on the
30". And there is what? Three pages in here on “What does an Assessor do”. What is their primary
work, what are they doing? And | went back and read this. And the primary work is permits, abatements,
data capture from permits not collected and exemptions. The very things | am talking about right here that
| am finding tracked in the data. So | am trying to say well did | miss something am | not seeing this
clearly? But that report seems pretty detailed. Now | just received today from a Right to Know, the permit
log, so | will be able to cross check all the open permits and who has gone to visit them and what has
been closed. But to give you an idea on these exemptions that she’s talking about that maybe they are
going out to exemptions; remember exemption properties don’t pay taxes so they are out of the tax base.
It is important to keep up on your exemptions but from a priority standpoint, if you have a permit
outstanding for a million dollars, that you need to go check or you have an exemption property that has
been exempt for 10 years, the priority would be for them to go check the million dollar permit. Because
that is the taxpaying property; you would worry a little bit less about the one that is consistently is not
paying and hasn’t made any changes. And that is to be expected. And that is what we should see going
on. We don’t see that all the time.
Now | referenced in my report you know, big property variations. The data that | received from AssessPro
from Ms. Kleiner showed that our assessor really hadn’t gone to very many properties. | pulled all the
property cards on; | said | want to see what the documentation is. Well lo and behold | found out, you
