As one of our more behind-the-scenes departments, our assessment employees are some of the unsung heroes of city government. They’re a small department with big responsibilities which include functions like providing accurate and equitable assessments on the value of every city property, processing residential property exemptions, processing of deeds, as well as ensuring one-time additions for services are applied to resident taxes, like when your street gets its slurry seal.
Here in Syracuse, we have 41,500 properties city-wide with 10 staff members within the assessment department, that’s a lot to manage and track with their many functions and all in the tides of a quickly changing housing market that has seen unprecedented change in the last 3 years. This has caused our Equalization Rate (a score delivered by the State that tells us the level of our property assessments across our property base) to fall quite significantly over the last 5 years.
Why does this matter, you ask? A higher equalization rate score tells us that here in Syracuse we’ve done a really good job of fairly sharing the tax pie with all our neighbors. However, once-in-a-generation increases on property values, changing demand in part due to COVID, and future needs for Micron are all indicators that there’s a need for us to innovate and improve the assessment change process, which is how our assessment department reviews data about the value of your home and assesses the value to see if your taxes should be adjusted.
In early 2023, the leadership of the department approached API to bring an innovation lens to assessment. Our goals for this work included streamlining steps and reducing paper while increasing our hit rate (or the number of changes made to assessments). We also wanted to maintain a system of checks and balances to minimize errors and omissions for these changes. All the while striving for a year-long workload evenness for assessment staff and ensuring that our residents find the process consistent. A monumental task you say. We say more than likely, but a journey we see loads of value in embarking on.
Understanding the Problem
Our discovery work had two branches: interviewing and shadowing the members of the department and then building and validating a process map.
Interviews and observations allow us to see how the work is completed firsthand and begin collecting all the information we can on the process. These conversations yield more than just raw information on how the cake is baked, we’re also able to learn from front-line staff where their pain points are and understand some of their feelings about doing this work on a regular basis. We also ensured that we spoke with leadership early on; homing in on different perspectives and priorities for the project work to come.
Our second pillar is the building out of our process map. In a previous blog, we talked about the value a process map can provide to our project. The process map was critical in helping us to identify several areas ripe for change, with the first distinction being the differences between each of our assessors and how they move through the process. With the larger map in front of us, we were also able to identify potential duplicative efforts. Then, we set off to synthesize and analyze all the data we collected. From there we identified themes and developed challenge statements.
From this process, we were able to compile a few challenge statements:
Completing field work and wrangling property photographs from multiple sources is time-consuming and cumbersome for assessors.
There are many software systems that are not being utilized to their fullest potential or may not fulfill the needs of the Department.
There is a lack of clarity from Assessment leadership on the long-term goals for trending.
The office has limited resources to meet the scale of the number of properties in our city. There are also perceptions that the office has been historically marginalized when it comes to investment in City departments.
Assessment staff spends a considerable amount of time answering phone calls that are not specifically assessment related; they are also lacking cross-training among staff, often leading to sole responsibilities for some.
There are several interdependencies that create bottlenecks within the process due to the timing of which they are completed or the time it takes to complete them.
Standards are unclear and applied inconsistently, which allows for several approaches within the department. There is also a lack of internal monitoring/accountability and external transparency with the public.
With our challenge statements fleshed out and validated we then identified 4 workstreams for our implementation work, which include paper-based processes, staff training and education, process bottlenecks, and systems review. Within these 4 workstreams, we’ve identified individual projects for implementation.
So, what comes next you ask? Only the fun stuff! We’ve aligned with leadership and staff on the recommended work to be done and we’ve spent some time thinking about the priority of each project we’ve identified with implementation. As we continue to work on fleshing out the finer details of this work, we’ll also spend some time thinking and talking about our timeline and resources for the project.