Over the last week I've had many hours of talks with Julie Ray and Bill Cinquanti about my reporting of the reassessment of Preble. Their main concern was my reporting that the Little York area was not assessed because of lack of time. They contend that time was not the reason it was not reassessed but rather there were sales all over the place and that made trending the area impossible. However it is going to be fully reassessed next year... So why didn't they reassessment it this year? Could it be... lack of time? You decide.

They encouraged me to come down to their office and look at the sales information and judge for myself. On Tuesday the 5^th, I spent several hours trying to do just that. I first asked for a printout of the sales for the last three years. The information is there but not in a form that can be printed out. Instead it is on 3x5 file cards up to the year 2000. 2001 is in a loose-leaf binder with one sale per sheet. It would take me more hours than I have to copy the information onto a yellow pad as suggested by Bill. For all intents and purposes it might as well be on top of Mt Everest. All of the other information is on the computers and is easy to look at and printout. Why this isn't is a mystery. Bill said he would see if he could get it in a form of a report for me to scan* in. If that happens I will post it. Till then you could go down and look at the records yourself. They are open from 8:30 to 4:30.

I will grant that some of the problems with this assessment are complicated by the decision to use new software. If anyone had asked me I would have advised against using new software in this or in any case. I've been in the computer field since the late 70's and one thing I've learned is that software that has a version number ending in a '0' should be avoided. And beta software as this is should only be used for testing, not for a real life situation. They didn't know this and went ahead and used it. As a programmer once told me... "You can always tell who the pioneers are by the arrows in their backs." Using this new software caused delays in getting the reassessments out by over a week and that cut down on the time for citizens to protest. No matter the reason or who was to blame the end result is that it was unfair to the citizens who had their taxes raised. When the problems were discovered they should have canceled the reassessment instead of going forward with a faulty plan.

They also said that the reassessment had nothing to do with the Preble town board and the 4 out of 5 town board members not getting their assessments raised and thus getting a tax break was not on purpose. Again I was encouraged to look at their properties and sales information to see if they were right. I would like to do that and will when I get the information in a form I can use.

They also said that sales supported trending the entire Song and Tully lake area as well as surrounding areas by the same identical 15% increases. Again, once this sales information is made available is a useful format I will post it.

The deadline for them to send out the final 'adjusted' reassessments is July 1^st. I did spend some time looking over the record format of what they have on computer and will ask for a report on the 1^st with as much useful information as is available and post that.

Comment. All of the people is the Real Property office are friendly, open and helpful. But it seems to me that getting the information one needs is far too difficult. Too many buzzwords are used, perhaps because they are normal to them, but for a non-expert it is difficult to follow. I am curious how many people get intimidated by the complexity of the system and just give up. You can get all the information, but so much of it is useless and if you don't know what you are looking for it can be overwhelming. For example during one conversation the term 'COD' was used. I asked what it was and was told it meant 'Coefficient of Dispersion'. It appears to be used as some measurement by the state to judge communities assessment accuracy. I asked for an explanation and neither of them could explain how it was determined. If you can't explain it then you don't understand it yourself. How is an ordinary citizen supposed to understand it?

I looked it up on the web and at this address (http://www.orps.state.ny.us/legal/rules/part185/sub185-1.htm )

I found the following... "Coefficient of dispersion or COD means the average deviation of a group of assessment ratios, taken around the median, arithmetic mean, or weighted mean ratio and expressed as a percent of that measure. For the purposes of Part 201 the COD measures the extent to which uniformity has been achieved by an assessing unit.

On another website I found this... "The coefficient of dispersion is the measure of an individual parcel ratio deviation from the median. The deviation indicates how uniformly the assessor is valuing parcels." http://206.247.49.21/ext/dpt/officials/assessor/audit98.htm

OK, now we've cleared that up we can move on.

Getting your taxes raised is not a pleasant event and when you talk to the assessor and complain about it you are in effect telling them that they did not do their job right and that they are being unfair to you. This has to have an effect on them. I work with dentists every day. While dentists are trained doctors, unlike other doctors, dentists cause their patients pain and many people hate dentists for that reason. It has been cited as one reason why dentists have the highest suicide rate. It wears on them to constantly be hurting the people they are trying to help. Assessors are trying to be fair to everyone but for obvious reasons they never hear from people who did not get their taxes raised, they only hear from people who are complaining about them not doing a good job. It has to have an effect on them. When you talk to them or go down to their office you are asking them to provide you with the information that will prove that they made a mistake. Sure the information is there but to expect them to jump for joy when another pissed off taxpayer shows up is beyond human reality. The job of assessor is another on my list of things I don't want to do, right up there with cleaning out septic tanks with a spoon.

Rather than blame the assessor or anyone else we should blame the system. Easy to say but hard to do considering that this is a touchy subject for old time Prebleites who remember not long ago when the assessments were very unfair and heavily weighted in favor of those in power. They see what has happened here as the same thing that happened before and the same group is being helped and they are footing the tax bill and getting screwed again... Can you blame them?

If it quacks... maybe it IS a duck.

Frank Hogg 6/8/1