Special Bd. of Aldermen — 11/26/2018 Page 15
any proof that there is finished basement or guessing at the number of bathrooms, bedrooms or anything else
without reason is not something that professional assessors are well-advised to do.
Alderman Jette
So your answer is you do need legislation to give you more authority.
Attorney Bolton
Well as | say in the past there was a disincentive to the tax payer to refuse entry and that disincentive was
removed. Now if any of the legislators from Nashua or elsewhere in the State just want to just give us blanket
authority to enter any premises it will make the assessing function easier. | think there will be some opposition
to that. Perhaps a compromise could be arrived at.
Alderman O’Brien
| think we’d be happy to except for that little document called the Constitution but we’ll have to look at that.
Alderwoman Kelly
Thank you. So | think that the responsibilities of the Chief Assessor are pretty well outlined in the report and my
question is around what the new role, the Administrative Service Director will do, and what the differences are,
because we don’t have a responsibility outline for that yet.
Ms. Kleiner
So one of the reasons that we were looking at the Administrative Services Director is the job description that it
had in the past was more extensive than just your Chief Assessor. So it was really responsible in one of the
things that we feel from the audit didn’t show and that is the communication between the Departments or now
they are called Divisions to ensure that the processes that they are putting in and the systems that they are
putting in, that there is proper input and communication amongst those. So that is what the Administrative
Services Director, when you look back in the history that Mayor Donchess spoke about, you see how there was
much more internal communication and buy-in of all the departments into whatever the function was being
evaluated or implemented. That would be more of that level. We do know that right now without a Chief
Assessor, someone is going to have to get in there and create an improvement plan and a way to move this
department forward. It is something that CFO Griffin and | have just started just as Mayor Donchess has asked
us to kind of continue with this process. We had our first staff meeting with them and the Mayor attended on
Tuesday. There has to be a lot more oversight without the Chief Assessor by the Administrative Services
Director certainly to begin with.
Alderwoman Kelly
Thank you that was informative. My question as a follow-up is when you are looking for this new person, what
kind of background are you looking for, are you looking for someone who would be heavily an Assessor or
heavily in IT; there are a lot of different departments that we are talking about overseeing. So what does that
look like?
Ms. Kleiner
So | think Mayor Donchess spoke to it best, you are not looking for someone that has a lot of specific knowledge
about every particular department, you are not going to find that, or if you do, take that person. You are looking
for someone who has solid management skills, looking for someone with a business background. | think your
past Administrative Services Directors had accounting backgrounds. The assessing, | mean you can attend
