Special Bd. of Aldermen — 11/26/2018 Page 19
Michael O’Connor Yes thank you, Michael O’Connor, | am at 42 Berkeley Street. So this morning | also
attended the Board of Assessor’s meeting and | had one simple question which led to a follow on but it was
basically about the two major findings which are the ineffective management of the assessing department and a
lack of internal procedures. | asked a question about who was accountable, | was actually glad to hear the
Aldermen bring up, | think it’s Section 42 in the Charter, because when | read that and that was one of the
reasons for my question. It was hard to understand who was responsible for this. The Board gave a direct
answer to the first one, was the Chief Assessor. But then the follow on question | had was — Well then who is
accountable for the oversight. And there it got a little more murky and correct me if I’m wrong, the Attorney, the
CFO, and Ms. Kleiner were there, but | think they clearly weren’t. And so | think that partially answers the
question. There didn’t seem to be any sense of accountability on their part and they said the CFO would have
been the person that they felt was accountable.
And then there was some vague comment that | didn’t quite follow about there was some small supervisory
responsibility of the State. | think this issue of accountability, I’m not just a crank about it, or | guess | am a little
bit of a crank about it. But it is really important. You know without, you know all organizations have some way of
dealing with this accountability, whether you are the Fire Department, the Police Department, | mentioned the
Navy, we all know when you are held to account for when things go wrong in the night. Here things went wrong
| think it is fair to say, even if you are, you know, reading between the lines. There was ineffective management
and it persisted for quite a long time. So who was aware of that? And | guess the answer was — Well maybe
the CFO but then | really it made, because | was sort of put in my place this morning because when the Attorney
was saying — Well these are personnel matters. I’m not trying to get into your personnel matters, I’m trying to
really understand your organizational chart and who should feel responsible and accountable for what went
wrong.
Because this wasn’t one rogue employee over a space of a week and suddenly somebody finally said — Oh hey
this has been persistent conduct for a while. And before you know, there needs to be trust as you move forward
to make it right now. So what | am hearing is that the CFO and this is not meant to be personal I’m sure he is a
fine fellow and he does a great job and | heard all the great work he does in finances. And the answer | heard
tonight sort of makes sense, it was the answer that might have been reasonable this morning except | guess |
was prying into personnel matters.
But the answer is that the man didn’t have enough time to do his job. But here we are, we are moving forward
now, ok and we supposed to trust that the people who are going to make this right are the same people who
don’t have time. The CFO didn’t have time to oversee the management issues in the office that he’s
responsible for, but now he has time to fix it? | don’t know, | think it is going to be really hard to gain trust in that
position.
The second thing that | wanted to bring up was something that | heard this morning that keeps coming up and it
is about the Assessing Department and there seems to be this conflation between the Customer Service part of
the Assessing Department and the output of the Assessment Department, which is fair and equitable
assessments. You know having had to become more familiar with what goes on in assessing and having gone
down there a number of times since last summer when the letters arrived | can tell you anecdotally from my
perspective, the customer service people are great. They are wonderful. Today | hear the Chair of the Board of
Assessors seems like a nice fellow but he’s saying — But aren’t the people really nice down there. Aren’t we all
happy? It’s as if you are going to some place to get surgery and the surgeon was incompetent but you had
some nice treatment up front and that’s all well and good.
| just don’t understand this obsession with trying to say — Yeah hey they’ve got great customer service, they are
great people, they are great underpaid public servants. No one is disputing that, what we are disputing is are
we arriving at fair and equitable assessments that people have confidence in?
The last thing that | wanted to say well actually two more things, I’m sorry. One is there is, and | hear we have a
Realtor here and | know it’s very controversial but there are automated evaluation methods that industry is
