Board of Aldermen 04-09-2019 Page 30
without an apparently screening process at all. So | don’t think we are living up to our policy and | think it
affects the quality of the work and the process and the product that we deliver here out of City Hall.
So that’s one thing. The other thing is | know that Ben wanted details, | needed to be more detail-oriented
on what | saw was wrong and all | can tell you is when | filed my PA71 with the State this is the binder that |
delivered. It contained many, many property cards, probably 300 pages. | put together a lot of detail
because | was disturbed by what | saw here in the City. | can’t come to a meeting like this and address that
kind of detail here. It just won’t work. Anyone can reach out to me and ask me if you want to be more
educated about the things | am concerned about, that’s fine.
The other thing is the Board of Assessors, | would like to be able to take most of my issues to the Board of
Assessors and have them addressed there. | don’t think they belong here. But! can’t make that avenue
work and it’s very frustrating. | delivered a letter on effective year build and concerns with an example on a
property card to them three weeks ago. It was completely ignored, not even acknowledged for the record.
They brought it back last week; they acknowledged it on the record but with no discussion. So if you can’t
get to a substantive discussion on issues that affect the quality of the assessing data base and a lot of
home, then what good are they?
| tried to track your meetings and one gentleman is very combative, so it is very difficult for me because |
see an individual who | believe has a personal agenda. They are not willing to look at the big picture stuff
that affects — you know — sales chasing, effective year build, these are all letters | kind of had sent to you,
MLS Correcting, Permit Captures. We are dealing with valuations; favoritism and unethical conduct when it
comes to assessing properties of potentially influential people. Those are important issues and if you can’t
have substantive discussions about those, | really don’t know how you improve the quality of the data. All
the software stuff you are doing is great but the software does not create the assessment on its own; the
judgements are coming from the people and ultimately the management within the office.
When | look at the Board of Assessors, last year they had 20 meetings, one cancelled, the average for
those 20 meetings was under 30 minutes with almost half of them being under 20. They have meetings
that are 6 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes, 13 minutes, 18 minutes, there are a lot of short
meetings over there. | think there is room to up their meetings, take yours down by pushing these issues to
them and getting them to respond. So it is super frustrating because they just won’t recognize anything.
They won't sink their teeth into anything or even acknowledge the need for potentially creating policy. So |
think policy is so important on a lot of these issues and they just won’t address it. | felt like we took a huge
step backwards last week with the use of the equalization ratio. One member doesn’t really believe in it: |
didn’t even know that was the case So that was difficult. There was a resident that came in to represent
an abatement and | thought it went really poorly for that individual and you really get this “us against them”
adversarial feel. It’s horrible, it’s uncomfortable; it was so stressful for the gentleman who came; he was
exhausted for two days after that whole event.
So | hope that there is some way that someone can give some assistance to what is happening in those
meetings so that they can become more substantive to work on what | think are the bigger issues. | know
that the City’s position, certainly with me, is “we’ve given you tons of time, you’ve talked to everyone, you’re
not happy, we’re never making you happy”. The reasons that I’m not happy is because the substantive
issues aren't addressed. They are waived off and told they’re nothing which is ultimately why | created a 3
inch binder that went to the State, because | couldn’t get any of that really looked at here. And |’m really
concerned about what is going on in that office. Management | think is very important; I’m super happy that
a few of you spoke about potentially a Chief Assessor or some management in that office. | cannot tell you
how important | think that is. | don’t want to hear from anyone here how hard the staff is working; some
work hard, some do not. We have some issues that have to be resolved: all is not equal. And that’s just
the way it is.
When it comes to HR and our Chief Position, we don’t even have a policy where upper management the
higher level people check in. The biggest issues is he wasn’t at work, he was at work 20, 25 hours a week,
this went on for years. So we don’t have a way that our people check in and get recorded to be paid, our
