Eddie Sundquist
Jamestown Mayor Eddie Sundquist says the cost to do a property revaluation will inevitably be higher following City Council voting down a proposal to do one this year.
Sundquist said Council’s concern about the timing not being right given the cost of everything from gas to food going up due to inflation were valid, but his team thought it was important to have the conversation.
The resolution voted down by Council would have spent $285,000 to hire GAR Associates to do the revaluation this year. The cost rose to $685,000 if Council opted to wait to do the revaluation next year.
Sundquist said he didn’t want the cost to be a shock if Council did agree down the road to do a property revaluation.
He also said it’s not a set requirement by the state that municipalities conduct a reval, “But often times the Real Property Assessor’s Office for the state will come down and say, ‘Hey, you really need to do these things. Your data is aging out,’ or sometimes it’ll be indicated in audits by the [State] Comptroller’s Office as well. And there have been times when the state has come in and said, ‘Okay, we want almost every community to do a revaluation,” and sometimes there are funds attached to it which is great and sometimes they’re not.”
Sundquist said the revaluation could be done in-house, but would require a lot more staff than the city has in the Assessor’s office, “And you would need to be able to have people, and pay people, that are really going to be able to understand the modeling that’s required as part of this. To pay an outside consultant to do that, to complete that, do it all for us is a lot cheaper than hiring employees with pension costs and other costs the city has to pay and that’s been evidenced by the Council in many different employment decisions.”
The Assessor’s Office is currently staffed by one assessor, one appraiser, and a part-time clerk.
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