Real Estate Taxes

Topic 3: Prorating Real Estate Taxes – August 7 Work Session
These are my notes, the notes of one citizen who attended. They are not minutes of the meeting. I post them here, because if you wait for the official minutes to come out, it will be October, and then if there were anything discussed that you wanted to take action about, it will be too late. If anyone was there and had a different take on what happened, just hit the Comments button and add your two cents.
Charlie Campbell was asked a few sessions back to come up with a plan to start collecting real estate taxes when the building is finished, instead of waiting until January of the next year. Charlie presented that he would need more staff to do that because he would have to send people out to the field to see if buildings were actually finished. So the Board asked him why he couldn’t just trigger the tax collection from something normally in the building process, like an Occupancy Certificate. And Charlie said (I’m paraphrasing here, Charlie didn’t exactly say this): “Not all that many people actually get Occupancy Certificates” That was the IDEA of what Charlie said, it’s not what he said.

This caused a realization on the part of the Board, I think, that there was a bigger problem at work.

Anyhow, the Board emphasized that they hadn’t intended to cause so much more work for the department that new staff would have to be hired for this task.