Special Bd. of Aldermen — 11/26/2018 Page 10
Ms. Kleiner
So we have asked CDM Smith for lack of a better term to “look under the hood’ of all the systems and let us
know and yes you are correct Alderman O’Brien. When you have a bunch of canned systems, you buy a lot of
canned systems, quite often people don’t really assess whether they can speak to each other effectively. That
is one of the questions that we have asked them to look at. Can these systems speak to each other, can they
speak to each effectively. They have let us know and in the course of this audit, CFO Griffin and | spoke with
Patriot, we had some good discussions and there are some communities that deal with Patriot, speaking directly
to MUNIS so there is a lot more work to investigate that and how we make that happen. So there are some
positive steps that we’ve found in this process, but | think you are going to see a lot more out of the report from
CDM Smith.
Alderman O’Brien
Follow up if | may — because | know a lot of this information has extra purposes too and | know this is not what
we are here to discuss tonight. But in looking at this CDM Smith coming in, it goes all the way to Police and Fire
Dispatchers as well too on how that comes up in 911 operation when the GIS and everything is working in
unison together. So CDM Smith they are going to look at the whole City | kind of hope to try to come up with
something that’s going to be the best that we can afford? Beautiful.
Alderwoman Kelly
Thank you. My questions are around the full measure and list. | am interested if we could go over what the
goals of that would be and what that would actually uncover or speak to in terms of the things we have
uncovered and then | have a couple of follow ups.
Mayor Donchess
Well maybe | can give a general answer and then if I’m off in any way | can be corrected. No one has sought to
go into all of the properties since 1991. Now certainly assessors have gone into properties when there is a
building permit or under other circumstances, but no one has sought to go inside all of the properties since
1992. And what this would do is potentially where assessors gained entrance, give them the opportunity to
discover things which were maybe not correctly characterized or captured in the property records. But also
would give them the opportunity and if they couldn’t get in they’d have to do this from the exterior to characterize
the quality of the property, the condition of the property as either good, very good and there’s a scale that they
use. So it would help with that. | mean one thing that hasn’t been mentioned and maybe Ms. Kleiner or Mr.
Griffin can get into it in more detail but one problem that has been identified as all of this discussion has gone
on, is that the effective year built is a very confusing factor.
When the Assessor before Mr. Duhamel was in office in quite some time, he created as we’ve been told, a very
complicated kind of jerry-rigged | don’t mean that too negatively but system that kind of only he understood. Mr.
Duhamel then just kind of adopted that and just went forward with it. But the idea would be to reduce, there
would still be an effective year built but to reduce its importance and simply rely principally on the condition of
the property as characterized by an inspection and rather than have the condition rely on the effective year built,
do the reverse and they can explain this in more detail. But what would be accomplished is we, our agents, the
assessors, we’d have to hire an outside firm to do this, would be able to view the internals of maybe 30% of the
houses.
Alderwoman Kelly
Follow up. The one that you presented over in 1992 was that done externally as well or internally?
