Board of Aldermen 03-12-2019 Page 28
focus on the actual development of the card and the modeling that we are using for that card and we want
to get rid of practices that weren’t good practices to be doing like the way we apply the median ratio and the
possibility that we were chasing some of these sales. That is important stuff. And nobody wants to
recognize it in the City but boy it is important to me.
So | get worried that every time we talk about bringing in a consultant it is KRT, you know we are
bedfellows now with them. Is there anyone else we can use? Should we look at somebody else when we
do this big, multi — you know, $1.5 million dollar contract would we even bid it? Do they now a precedent
and they are the ones that come all the time? You know | think we should expand our thinking and | think
we should look at other experts too, | think that’s a good idea. KRT, to my disappointment, when this
happened and they went down the street the second time and | called them in October and | said, “Well you
haven’t come to my house” and they said, “Well Mr. Duhamel told us you wouldn’t let us in so we never
showed up”. Of course | wanted them to come in| went to the meeting for that. So Mr. Duhamel had a
bitterness to him and made certain that KRT didn’t come to our house. So that’s when KRT said to me,
“Hey we went down your street, we took another drive by, the City asked us to do it, we drove down, we
raised 5 homes”. | said, “Well who did you lower?”. “Nobody”. How does that work, | said, “What other
streets did you go down”. “Only yours”. | said, “They didn’t ask you to go down any other streets | gave a
package, | looked at my street behind me, | looked at Concord Street, you didn’t look at any other street”?
“Nope, just yours the City said just do yours again’. That was very targeting; that was really very targeting,
that was not a great model approach.
And then when | wrote a letter to CFO Griffin and | said, “Who really authorized this? Why did we do this
and who authorized KRT to do this drive by and make these changes’ and this appears outside the scope
of work well KRT writes back, John Griffin sends them to KRT and KRT writes back to that request that the
street was reviewed along with the rest of the City during the evaluation process, the initial process. It was
reviewed a second time at the homeowner’s request during the peering process, both reviews were part of
our contract. So all of a sudden the second review was put on me. And that’s why when people on my
street called the Assessing Office and said, “Why were we evaluated again”. They were told, “Your
neighbor complained and she caused the houses to go up”. That was not right. | never had a dialogue with
KRT. | was never the one in charge of KRT. | didn’t order a second go down on the street, it is absurd. And
why would | do that and not have them come to my own home that | was trying to reduce? It was really
disappointing for me to read that. And it made me think a lot differently about KRT when | did the Right To
Know Law and pulled those minutes and saw that was how it was documented.
I’ve been spending a lot of time reading the IAAO manual and there is a nice one on Standards on Mass
Appraisal for Real Estate Property” and it talks about how important it is to value defend your numbers.
And this is the guide that everyone here throws at me constantly, the Mayor, CFO Griffin, we follow the
IAAO manual. Great: it says that the staff should also be prepared to support individual valuations as
required preferably through comparable sales. At a minimum the staff should be able to produce a property
record and explain the basic approach used to estimate the value of the property. The property owners
should never be told simply that the computer or the system produced the appraisal. In general, the staff
should tailor the explanation to the tax payer’s knowledge and expertise, equations converted to tabular
form can be used to explain the basis for valuation. We could never get anyone to explain our card or have
any information brought to us on how it was built. We never got there, we are in abatement without an
explanation. And as | read these things and these are the standards we use, | feel that we’ve got a lot of
work to do on these standards.
One last item, | didn’t realize Mr. Teeboom was going to talk about the Board of Assessor’s seat, the
alternate. And | discovered that seat had expired essentially very oddly, | just happened to be going to
Board of Assessor’s Meetings and they kept cancelling meetings. And | finally went to the Assessing
woman, clerk lady, and said, “Why are we canceling, why aren’t we calling our alternate in to keep the
meetings going” and she said “We don’t have an alternate, her seat expired a year ago”. | said, “are you
kidding me, we are not running meetings because we don’t have an alternate”. You know, ok, | could do
