The Finance Committee of the City of Waukesha met on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, at 6:00 PM in Council Chambers at City Hall. Chair Joe Pieper presided. Committee members present: Joe Pieper, Rick R. Lemke, Alicia Halvensleben, Doreen Wigderson. Absent: Elizabeth Moltzan. The meeting adjourned at 6:17 PM.
All right, good evening. Good evening, everyone. We'll call the Tuesday, January 27th, 2026 meeting of the Finance Committee to order. We do have a quorum this evening. Alder Person Moltson is not with us this evening. Next item on our agenda is Pledge of Allegiance. Please rise. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God. All right. Next item on our agenda is public comment. I do not see any members of the public here this evening. So we'll move on to item number four A, which is approval of minutes for the 11th of November. Were there any changes to those minutes from the committee? Move to approve. Seeing none, we'll make um we'll those minutes will be you're throwing me off, Rick. We'll move those minutes are approved by unanimous consent. We'll move into our business items, which is uh first of all number five A, which is a review and possible action on the renewal of a contract with accurate for commercial appraisal work. Sam, if you'd introduce yourself for the folks at home and the floor is yours. Good evening, Sam Walker, City Assessor. Um hopefully this will be a relatively quick action item. Um what we're uh wanting to do is we're gonna renew the contract for accurate. The current contract is only for two years, which covers 2025 and 2026. This would actually extend it out to a four-year contract, so it would cover 27 through 2030, but also uh change the revaluation cycle, so we would only be doing one revaluation in that four years as opposed to two. With us making that change, the contract would actually decrease on an annual basis, saving about 16,000 a year. That's all I got. And Sam, can you remind the committee how long City's been working with Accurate? Uh this is our second year we're going into it. And the reason is I should maybe just a little bit of color on the reason that we have the contractor. So our our previous commercial appraiser retired back in 204. Yes. Years are running together back in 24. Uh, we tried to hire someone, um, we could not find anyone for um for months. The only two people that were potentials both withdrew and with reevaluation coming down, we just decided to contract it out in the interim. Um it's worked out so far, as far as I'm aware, and as far as I'm concerned, um, that you know, we're happy with the level of service and the level of work that they've been doing, and we would like to continue working with them. Great. Thank you, Sam. Any questions for Sam? Alder Person Helvin Slayton? I just want to make sure I'm understanding this right. So are we no longer going to be doing a revaluation every two years? Or we are, but it's it's because it's falling in the timeline differently. So this is part of what I call my lessons learned. Um I came into this role, it was done every two years. Um we missed 2021 because of software. We picked it up in 23, did it in 25. I fell into the habit of just what we've always done. Um this last year we learned a lot. And we learned that you know, maybe doing it every two years might be overkill. Um that's not to say that we might do it in two years.