Special Bd. of Aldermen — 11/26/2018 Page 4
done by KRT is sound, has achieved equity between properties which is the underlying purpose of a
revaluation; at least equity within the data we have. Maybe that equity will be improved by the full measure and
list revaluation or inspection that we undertake. But at least given what we have now, the relative equity within
the properties has been achieved by the full measure and list.
And | guess in terms of how we should proceed, | would ask this, we have faced more controversial issues than
this before. | mean certainly we have heard some valid criticism regarding some of the things that have
occurred in the Assessing Office. But we have faced more and the audit bares that out. But we have faced
more controversial issues than this before. So if we are going to move forward as a community as | hope we
will do, | think it would be better and more constructive that no one use sort of flaming rhetoric, hyperbole about
what is going on. No one down in the Assessing Office, in my opinion, intentionally did anything wrong or
committed any kind of malicious acts. They might have achieved an assessment or arrived at an assessment
that people disagree with or maybe that is incorrect, but it was done in good faith based upon the expertise of
the people down there. They are public servants who have been working for the City; they are not highly paid,
they do the best job they can and like any umpire, they are probably right most of the time, but occasionally a
ball gets called as a strike and occasionally a strike gets called as a ball. But that is inherent in sort of the
human condition. So | think our task as leaders of the City, mine as the Mayor, should be to work with the
people down there, give them more tools, improve their software, you will hear all of the details and listen to the
remarks and comments as we have done and move forward with as much unity as we can with as much
goodwill as we can, mutual goodwill, so that as a community we can achieve an assessing function that is
effective, which has public confidence and which will achieve at least the greatest degree of accuracy that within
an exact science is possible.
So with that | turn it over to Mr. Griffin and Ms. Kleiner. | am available for questions but probably it is best just to
get the whole thing out. Why don’t | turn it over to Mr. Griffin and Ms. Kleiner to talk through any of the details:
they obviously can answer your questions as well.
Kim Kleiner, Chief of Staff
Good evening, thank you for having us. If it pleases the Board | would like to walk a little bit through the
methodology used for the audit. | want to state that this is a common methodology that is used with any
management audit report. This was not designed by us although this is a structure that | have used before,
generally most used in inventory management, purchasing, receivables, I’ve seen it used in production
efficiencies, things of that sort. So when you get to the back and you are reading through the questions, those
questions were not designed by us, they are designed by a group that puts together management audit reports
and they are from a set of questions that commonly used and that I’ve used before in other audit reports.
So Mr. Griffin and | started the process shortly after the Mayor instructed us to do so last November. We
conducted interviews with the questions that you see in the back of the report with every single employee in
assessing, including the Chief Assessor. They were separate interviews, Mr. Griffin conducted a set and |
conducted a set and they were very thorough. We then moved from assessing all the internal policies within the
Department and the individual employee’s knowledge of such policies. We moved through policies and
standards that are written by the International Association of Assessors and we looked at those in comparison
to ways that our internal policies were written.
We then looked at different operational procedures and the way that work was flowing through the department
between different employees. We studied the Board of Assessor meeting minutes and agendas, their board
packets, we worked through budget information, we had consultations with various other City departments
including IT and we consulted with various outside organizations and consultants that we’ve dealt with, Patriot
Systems, KRT, CDM Smith. From there, we quickly then moved to looking at what we could find for various
best practices, which is a common procedure. We sat with many of our internal employees in IT and worked
through how the system flows and our data flows from various organizations. So you have Assessing, then you
have the tax system, you have building permits that are feeding all these systems have to interact and we
