2014-01-08 Board of Ethics Minutes

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groups of parcels, entire groups of sales, and neighborhood to neighborhood. I’d like to refer you to the inserts 1 and 2. Insert 1 reflects Marilyn’s neighborhood, and Marilyn is your Petition 2013-06, in which there are 1,955 parcels. This is an area in the Waiākea area, and it’s a very large area. It’s not a small group. Some of us used to call them kumiais. This is a very broad area. And Marilyn—excuse me—in Mary Ann’s case, which is your Petition 2013-05, it is referring to 97 parcels. Now these 97 were based on like properties. Once an appraiser determines whether a change needs to be made or not, they submit the request to myself and the appraisal supervisor. Along with the requested change, we require each appraiser to submit all documentation to support the change. An appraiser cannot simply change their own neighborhood. The request for a neighborhood to change or remain the same needs to be justified. I’ve included Inserts 3 and 4, which is a common submittal that I receive, as well as the appraiser supervisor, to determine whether the justification has been made to change a neighborhood. The administrator or I make all the changes, as we are ultimately the individuals responsible. And I know this is already getting kind of long, and I can get into more detail on this, but I just wanted to show you that they do have to provide us the sales. And then on the bottom, it also includes the sales that was not considered and why. In this case this is one parcel out of a whole group of sales, and because of it could not extrapolate the one single sale price for that particular lot. This year, like every year, I review the preliminary recommendations for the requested changes to the neighborhoods, and I determine whether there is evidence to support the change. The administrator is required to provide to the Board of Review a sales ratio analysis annually, which reflects the ratios of the final value to sale price of vacant land, improved properties, and condominiums. We further break this down to the zone level, and we also provide any data that was not deemed to be utilized in the sales ratio. So everything in this process is transparent. This element reflects that not only are the values and our process reviewed by administration, it is also reviewed by the Board of Review, which is comprised of citizens in our community. While the petition talks about an appraiser directly affecting their individual parcel’s land value, in reality they would need to affect their entire neighborhood. The only way an appraiser could significantly affect their own taxes would be to submit a significantly lower recommendation to change the land pricing table for their neighborhood, which would have to be supported by market data and pass our review. An extreme example would be setting their land value all the way to zero, which would never happen, all for just a minimal financial benefit of savings to Mary Ann’s parcel of $81.12 and for Marilyn’s parcel, $72.82. In the last hearing there was a question as to how often administration questioned the recommended values that were submitted. This year I have requested clarification on 45 neighborhoods, and we still have through the end of January to determine final land values, so we’re not quite done yet. This is typical for this period of time. 8