Tax Assessment Work Group Special Meeting

Meeting recap

What happened, drawn from the records published after the meeting. Minutes

This is the county examining a revaluation that went wrong, in public, with the people who complained about it in the room. The work group is co-chaired by three commissioners and includes community representatives from two districts, a representative of a state housing coalition and one from a property tax justice group, alongside the county manager, budget director, chief civil rights officer and the interim tax administrator.

The review consultants set out four guiding principles - comprehensive, statistically rigorous, focused on vertical inequity, and operational - with a formal report due September 2026. Vertical inequity is the technical term for what commissioners and residents had been describing all year: cheaper properties assessed above their worth and expensive ones below.

The feedback the group gave is unusually blunt for a published summary. Members raised overvaluation of lower-income properties and undervaluation of higher-income ones; concerns about how lower-income owners are treated by specific staff in the tax office, and whether those staff will be interviewed; suspected double standards in land valuation and sales qualification compared with other counties; a wish for values to be explained upfront rather than only through an appeal; and interest in bringing commercial valuation in-house. Every member was offered a private twenty-minute interview with the consultants.

The recruiter asked what the next tax administrator must face, and the answers name the damage directly: rebuild trust after the revaluation, establish consistency and accountability in the office, prepare for heightened scrutiny at the next cycle, and - in the group's own words - cultivate a willingness to acknowledge and correct errors rather than deflect concerns. Also on the list: workload from housing growth, rezoning, accessory dwellings and townhouses, and integrating new technology including artificial intelligence to improve data accuracy. That material goes into the recruitment brochure, the interview questions and a skills assessment for finalists.