Okay.

We're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session to order.

It is eleven forty nine AM on December seventeenth, twenty twenty four.

Turn my mic on.

We'll go ahead and call the afternoon session back to order.

Welcome everybody.

We're going to move on down the three point one, Miss Nixon.

You have a guest you want to introduce us to.

Yes, thank you, Mayor.

April Nixon CFO.

Today we have as a visitor Joe Don Bobbitt, who is the new chief appraiser at the Terrant Appraisal District.

He came to us in February of this last year.

And so he's new to the system and making lots of changes and that sort of thing.

So we thought he could come and brief you on those.

And so if there's ever anything that y'all want questions or have answers to, I'm more than happy to come back out and address anything that y'all have questions regarding, whether it be values or anything else.

And so we have two new members, and then we'll have three returning.

So come January 1st, the new members will have to be appointed and sworn in, and then they'll take office.

The reappraisal plan, this is what kind of has made the news most recently.

The board of directors has they made motions to direct me to not reappraise for 2025.

So the values from 24 will be carried over for residential.

Most of the changes they made were directly regarding residential properties.

And so the residential values from 2024 will roll forward until 2025 and 26, and then we'll reappraise again in 2027.

2025 is a property value study year for us.

And so the state control's office will come in and look at all of our numbers and make sure that we are plus or minus 5%, is what they're looking for.

If we get outside of 14 and a half percent, then the schools lose funding or potentially lose funding.

The benefits to the plan deal with uh potentially reducing the number of protests.

We've gone from you know decades ago is 40,000 protests total to well over 200,000 at this point.

A lot of that is more so tied in with as values and taxes increase, the number of protests increase with it.

This isn't just a tarrent appraisal district problem, this is across the state.

As values have gone up, the number of protests have gone up drastically.

We're hoping that by doing the reappraisal plan every two years going forward, people only have to come in and see us once every other year.

So it may give people a break on the in the off year that we don't reappraise, is kind of the thought.

And so that'll provide additional stability to the taxpayers, and so they won't have to come in and argue with us every year, they'll kind of know what to expect.

Um it does have limited impact on staff workload.

So one of the the thoughts was that if we had to reappraise every other year, it may reduce our workload, uh, maybe our staff requirements.

The the amount of analysis that we do that actually goes into our reappraising is really limited to maybe a two-week to four week period where we actually look at sales, do the analysis, and make all the the final changes to the values.

So most of the time of the year, the appraisers are are actually out in the field looking at permits, uh looking at new construction, and they're trying to make sure that what's on the ground actually matches what we have in the system.

And so that work will still be done.

The other half of the year, we're we're kind of dealing with appeals and protest.

So it's limited on how much it'll save us on manpower.

On the process change, we are trying to focus more on customer experience.

Uh this year we we got the average wait time down to 15 minutes if you came into the office to protest.

Prior to that, there were stories of it being two to four hours just on a routine basis.

And so the staff had a lot of good ideas on on changes to the process, and they they made a lot of improvements.

Uh we did have a higher protest uh settlement rate this year, and so I know some of the staff had brought that up as far as compared to in years past, it looked like we had we had uh lowered the value more during the protest season than we had in past years.

Some of that was due to ransomware, not directly because of it because of the timing, kind of compressed our timeline.

We wanted to make sure that we certified on time as required by state law, and so the staff were kind of given the directive, be a little more lenient with the taxpayers.

If they have a decent argument argument, go ahead and agree with them or get close, but you know, we're not trying to give away the farm, but at the same time, if it's close, don't need to send them to the ARB in a formal hearing.

Uh a lot of that had to do.

We also wanted to reduce wait times.

There was a pretty big demand from the public to be easier on the taxpayers and be less of an impact.

Um repeat protests will be difficult to settle.

So if people came in last year and protested, if we don't raise the values, if they're if they come in again next year, we may not have a lot of room to negotiate with them what we have in the past.

So if people are coming in year after year, the second year they may just be disappointed that we can't give them a 10% uh reduction in value.

Um we're also pushing a lot of people to our website.

Um we've enhanced that quite a bit, so now you have a dashboard, which you've had in the past, but we're really trying to push people to that where you can see your evidence, you can see our our evidence, you can upload information, uh, you can reschedule your protest, and we're trying to make it easier on the taxpayer so everything's there available for them.

We've had quite a few personnel changes since 2023.

Uh I'm here.

Uh we created the deputy role, which is William Durham.

If you want to raise your hand, William.