Special Bd. of Aldermen — 11/26/2018 Page 9
Steven Bolton, Corporation Counsel
Previously about 15 years ago, the law provided that if a tax payer refused entry to his or her property they lost
their right to seek an abatement. Legislature, in its infinite wisdom changed that law and now there is no
disincentive provided to effectively stonewall the municipality. There is a procedure an instrument that one
seeks that is called an Administrative Search Warrant. And like other search warrants, it gets issued by a judge
and it has to be based upon reasonable suspicion that municipal, that there is something untoward going on,
building without a permit, housing code violations, zoning violation, something like that or that it is part of an
extensive program to search out either those sorts of violations or for tax assessment purposes.
| question whether that is entirely consistent with the 4" Amendment but it is not unreasonable to say you want
to look at the interior structure of property that you are trying to assess for tax purposes. | have no doubt that if
we get reports that seem credible that — Hey | was in my neighbor’s house and they’ve got a finished basement
and | don’t have a finished basement and yet my house is assess for more than their house. We go over, we
look at the house from the outside, we see that they’ve got curtains hanging in the basement windows which
you can detect from the outside, maybe | can go in and get an Administrative Search Warrant to get us in that
house to see if they’ve got a finished basement. Maybe in the course, and it is a big maybe, in the course of a
full measure and list, | can get Administrative Search Warrants more extensively than that. And | am willing to
try but there is absolutely no guarantee.
Now for those of you in the Legislature, if you want to give us some assistance here, that would be welcome.
The old system had a degree of fairness to it, that if you weren’t going to cooperate, we weren’t going to
cooperate with you. So food for thought.
Alderman Klee
This is the year to do it.
President Wilshire
All set Alderman Klee?
Alderman Klee
| am thank you very much.
Alderman O’Brien
Yes thank you. When | glossed over this | saw a lot of problems and my previous life on the fire department
after | watched the original Back to the Future, they taught me the Admin System, you know the VACs and
everything and | was wondering if we could save some money in selling it to the Smithsonian. We are probably
the only City to still use it. But when you have a choke collar on your dog you aren’t going to, such restraints
from upgrading through the tax base, you get into these fall behind situations and | understand. But you get a
program to work with this because I’ve rolled through the Lawson years when that was brought in and
everything and they don’t fit tight and this and it’s like buying baggy pants sometimes.
But the thing is, with this report, because | know we are going to look at this in the future and | am wondering
farther down the line, | see that the Smith Company CDM Smith is going to report back relatively soon, late
March into April. Maybe some of their recommendations would be recommendations on programming is that
correct? And that is going to be affecting perhaps maybe this year’s budget in a way correct?
