Special Bd. of Aldermen — 04/30/2019 Page 7
Also in April an item that had been brought to us during the Management Audit was that there seemed to be
some confusion between the title “Appraiser” and the title “Assessor”. So to be clear on some of our city job
descriptions, the title had been “Assessor/Appraiser’. That was the title always on the job descriptions from as
far back as | can see. It was not meant to say what their certification was. It was strictly their job title. So if you
look on my business card, it says “Chief of Staff’. Why? Because it is clearly my job description, it’s my job title
that is on my PDF that’s it. But we understood and went and we removed the word “appraiser” on the business
cards and left the word “assessor” which is their certification although we do have one certified appraiser in the
office and we re-printed all of the business cards.
Also, this past month, we reviewed all of the job descriptions so we took them all, we edited them to a new City
format. This is something that we started within City Hall well over a year ago; so some of our jobs within City
Hall have already been updated to a new format. We thought that it was important to go through all of Assessing
and bring them up to date. They have all been completed and forwarded to Human Resources and the Union for
review.
There has been a lot of conversation about a new mileage reimbursement policy. Mayor Donchess created a
Policy Committee and we are currently reviewing all City Policies. The first one that we looked at because of the
Management Audit was this new mileage reimbursement. That has been written and it has been approved by
the Mayor, there is a process where it has now been sent to the Union for review. But until that mileage
reimbursement log is approved and set into a full motion, we are asking our assessors to continue the use of
their weekly field data collection logs. You can see a description here, this is just an example of one. We are
reviewing this data prior to any mileage reimbursement. And you can see here it is clearly listing the property
address, the date, the time of arrival, the reason for being there and who was there. We feel that at this time this
is very similar to what the new mileage reimbursement form will have for data and this is sufficient.
The next item in the Management Audit was internal training programs for Assessing & Administrative Staff to
conduct orientation and informal workshops with the Board of Assessors. So we have gone through and this is
an example of an individual’s training within the assessor’s department. We have completed this for every single
employee within the department and we are now looking at gaps and things that we feel need to be addressed
overall and individually. So this is just an example of one. We know there are some upcoming trainings, | myself
will be taking a training in May. Mike Mandile, one of our Assessing Officers will be taking, continuing on in his
course of studies in taking a Level 300 course. We are currently looking at how to provide the general public with
an Assessing 101 and we have spoken with KRT and we would join with KRT and some of our internal staff to
have a public meeting hopefully held more towards the end of May where people can come in and ask questions
and we can give an overall on people’s properties cards, what the information means, things of that sort.
We are also looking at having an orientation for our Board of Assessors. As you know, there has been a new
member appointed to the Board of Assessors to come up for an interview May 6". After that person is hopefully
seated upon the Board, we’d like to have a review of the report by KRT which is the lovely manual down on the
floor. | think we can probably get that done in an hour. The Board of Assessors talk about best practices, some
of which we have identified, we’ve seen some, we actually pulled some old documents that existed on board
practices back in the day. We'd like to have the Board work on that, talk about how they see moving forward,
what improvements they’d like to make and then we’d like to have some presentations by staff because not all of
the members of the board, both current and of course being appointed know exactly what the staff do. So we
think that will be important.
| spoke a little bit about reduce the reliance on the City’s Legacy Admin Software. Again, that’s in August of
2019, it coordinates with IT and with Patriot. It is important to note that from January to April we are taking in and
processing credits and exemption applications from mid-November we are taking in and processing abatements.
