Special Bd. of Aldermen — 11/26/2018 Page 6
by the State Department of Revenue Administration and how it will go is this; we will submit it, KRT will bring it
to the folks at DRA in Concord tomorrow, they will have a four to six week period to review, make any
suggestions to KRT who are the author of that document. Then we will get that document delivered. We had a
meeting with the Board of Assessors today and that document | look at as very critical to us moving forward in
that | firmly believe that we could have a public/private meeting where KRT would come in and explain, not all
700 pages of course, but explain their methodology because a lot of the good questions that have been asked
by a lot of different people in this proceeding is things like use of effective year built. That’s basically the key
ingredient to recapturing depreciation; use of MLS data, sales data, qualified sales data versus non-qualified.
As the Mayor indicated, we’ve got a veteran staff in the Assessing Department and they’ve been trained over
the course of time and they use these tools the way they’ve been trained. So there is probably an opportunity to
leverage off the knowledge of the KRT team and make some changes on kind of the nuts and bolts of how you
calculate assessments. But what Ms. Kleiner and | came up with was kind of a notion that on the assessing
side, we have kind of offloaded that to the State level. So when | figured out what the training was, it is more
keeping up with typical State training which is getting familiar with code changes, State Laws, etc. The
assumption is, is that by looking at the, and it is very difficult for me to look at it but the USPAP Manual, not the
one | just described but the one that guides the conduct of assessors, it is quite complicated. So there is an
International Association of Assessing Officials that basically sponsor that book and it is an international book.
| think | would just like to say that that report that we are anxiously awaiting for, | think that is going to shed a lot
of light on how things are conducted. The other thing | recommended and you'll see it in the recommendations
is we’ve got kind of a complicated way of describing things to people; whether it is effective year build, cost
doesn’t equal value; value doesn’t equal cost and also confused a little bit by building permit data where an
individual who pulls a building permit isn’t really bound to bring in the work order or the quote from the builder or
the contractor. So l’m not sure we’ve got a tight grip, | am not criticizing any departments, I’m not sure that we
have a system in place, at least on the assessing side to basically challenge values that have been put on
building permits. The other thing is we are really struggling with the ability to get into a house even when they
pull the building permit but certainly if they don’t pull a building permit, we may not know they’ve ever done
anything. So as the Mayor indicated, the full measure and list hasn’t been done since 1992 but started earlier
than that. But great questions this morning if you can only get into 30% of the houses is that good enough and
our expert KRT says that is the reality of the business we are in, but it worthy of a shot to at least update as
many cards as we can.
These cards, if you think about it, these property cards of almost 28,000 parcels, they’ve been ebbed and
flowed over decades of building permits, revaluations, changes and as the Mayor indicated, one of our team
members through pictometry, we can look with a fly over, we can look to see at least on the outside what has
been added and we’ve done a great job of capturing value in there, whether it be a deck, swimming pool, a filled
in swimming pool to subtract, etc. So | think that is the thoughts that | have with regard to how we move
forward.
Another touching point on the software, Ms. Kleiner and | brought all the team in, assessors, IT, GIS, etc and
we’ve kind of cobbled together a bunch of disparate software systems and just to shed some light on that — the
Admin System was run on what was called the VACS, so if you remember Digital Equipment Corporation, they
created the VACS, software ran on it. And | remember in that time period, | think it was like everybody is your
own programmer. Fortunately we have one person in the office, IT that knows how to program Admins. So if
you recall, 2 years ago, we went to MUNIS Tax Billing. We kept Admins as the link between AssessPro and
MUNIS. We need, as Ms. Kleiner says, we need to use the horsepower of Assess Pro which was installed in
2005, created in 2000. There certainly have been upgrades but the Patriot Property President doesn’t push us
on it but we have to more effectively use that for abatements, exemptions and credits, things of that nature
because that should be a direct feed through the MUNIS which basically all the software that we have both
Lawson and MUNIS there are upload capability through Excel. So I’m not saying we are going to be able to
feed from Admins into MUNIS but we can at least eliminate the Admins function. And that’s where Ms. Kleiner
