The City Council held a work session on May 12, 2025, from 9:02 AM to 4:46 PM (including an executive session from 12:09 PM to 4:18 PM). Council heard presentations on the 2025 pre-preliminary property values, discussed and acted on a cross-functional team’s recommendations to reform boards and commissions, and approved relocating the public safety complex from Martin Luther King Drive to Global Reach Drive. No consent calendar items were considered.
Well, good morning, everyone. We're going to call this meeting to order. And Ms. Prime? Good morning, Mayor. Good morning. This is a work session of the Al Paso City Council for Monday, May 12th, 2025. It is 9 02 a.m. Mayor Johnson is present and presiding in Council Chambers, along with Mayor Potem Chavez, Representative Acevedo, Representative Malonado Rocha, Representative Boyatrejo, Representative Nino, and Representative. Mayor, we have a quorum. Thank you. Representative Nina, would you lead us into the Clech? Mayor that brings us to item number one, and this is presentation discussion by the El Paso Central Appraisal Districts Executive Director and Chief Appraiser, Dinah Kilgore on the City of Al Pasos 2025, pre-preliminary values and protest period. Good morning. Good morning, uh Mayor, Councilmember. Uh Dinah Kilgore, executive director, El Paso Central Appraisal District, and David Stone, uh, deputy chief uh appraiser. Uh we do uh kind of an in tandem, uh we work together, so I'll give part of the presentation and uh he'll give the other. Sure. Um, give you some ideas on some of the numbers we're looking at. Uh some of y'all are new to the council, so we're gonna kind of uh explain who we are and and what it is we do. Um PowerPoint is it up? IT will bring it up. Okay, I don't need to. Okay. All righty. So we did submit uh a little presentation for you guys to keep. Um I know you have plenty of other paperwork, but let's just add this to it, okay. Uh so first of all, what is what is mass appraisal in the state of Texas because of the amount of appraisals that uh the taxing entities have, the amount of properties that we have back in 1979, the Pivodeau bill was put into place by state legislation to appraise properties uh under the mass appraisal basis. Okay, right here. Um so appraisal districts, there's about 254 appraisal districts. Every county has appraisal district, and we appraise properties on a kind of a bell curve. We look at neighborhoods, we look at what's going on in that neighborhood, and we come up with what the average is in that neighborhood and set those values. If we were to try to do an individual fee appraisals, um that would be very costly, about 72 million dollars, and take about 10 to 13 years to do. So that's why they allow for mass appraisal. Disadvantages of mass appraisal is we don't know the particulars of a property. Uh so that's one of the things that we have to deal with. Is Texas is a non-disclosure state. Uh we are Texans, we don't like to tell anybody our business, and so trying to get sales information uh sometimes is a little bit difficult. And we also don't know what's going on in their property. That's why the protest season is very, very important, and that's upon us, and we're gonna get into that in a little bit because there's some deadlines we really want to bring up to uh the council so that they can let their constituents know. Um this is your annual tax calendar. This is uh kind of our portion of it. Uh we start uh we actually start uh appraising in August after our hearings uh with our field work. Uh the tax part of it, you can see when they do their assessment and and collection phase. I think this is a good calendar for for y'all to have. Okay, now this is category taxable value. We're gonna get into some numbers. I'm gonna let David uh go take it over from now. And for the record, representatives Pierro and Canales join the meeting at 9.04 and 905, respectively. Good morning, council.