How To Understand Your Real Estate Property Taxes and Why They Continue Increasing

➡ The Clay County Commission meeting began with a prayer led by Pastor Mark Willis, who urged everyone to focus on commonalities rather than differences. The meeting proceeded with roll calls and approval of the agenda. A resolution recognizing World Elder Abuse Awareness Day on June 15, 2025, was discussed, with Tina Uridge from Senior Services sharing alarming statistics about elder abuse in Clay County. The meeting concluded with the consent agenda, which included routine items for approval.
➡ On June 5th, the commission approved several resolutions including invoice payments, road approval, pavement marking, copier printer lease, hazardous waste disposal, a grant application, a memorandum of understanding with a school district, and an appointment to a committee. They also approved invoice payments for the Prosecutor’s office and a budget revision to purchase an ATV, UTV and trailer for the sheriff’s office. Lastly, they discussed approving a contract for a new master plan for the county’s parks, recreation, and historic sites.
➡ Property assessment involves three methods: cost, market, and income approach. The cost approach, which considers factors like square footage and construction quality, is most commonly used. The market approach uses sales comparisons, while the income approach is typically used for larger residential properties. The process of mass appraisal, used for large-scale assessments, differs from individual fee appraisal. Property values may change due to reassessment, influenced by market trends and local amenities. An increase in assessed value doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in property taxes. The assessment process involves field staff inspecting properties, recording data, and comparing it to market data from the neighborhood. This process helps ensure property values align with neighborhood sales.
➡ The article discusses the process of property assessment and the challenges it faces, such as the 15% rule that limits how much a property’s market value can be increased without a physical inspection. It also highlights the issue of properties being under-assessed, leading to unfair tax burdens. The article uses Clay County as an example, showing how its median home sale price has drastically increased over the past 10 years, making it difficult for assessment offices to keep up. Lastly, it explains the appeal process for homeowners who believe their property has been incorrectly assessed.
➡ The discussion revolved around property evaluations and tax assessments in Clay County. The county has around 81,000 residential single-family home parcels, with about 13,000 properties increasing in value by over 15%. After accounting for new constructions and improvements, approximately 7,000 properties had their value increase by over 15%. The county’s website provides detailed information for citizens, including videos and FAQs. The meeting concluded with appreciation for the team’s work and a discussion about potential changes to property tax laws.
➡ The discussion revolves around the issue of property tax caps and levies in Clay County. The speaker argues against capping property values, stating it leads to unfair redistribution of taxpayer money. Instead, they suggest the most effective way to ease tax burdens is by limiting levies, which could be achieved through state-level legislation. They also emphasize the importance of staying close to true market value to ensure fairness and avoid drastic increases in the future.
➡ The discussion revolves around the increase in property taxes due to rising property values over the past decade. The speaker suggests that the solution lies in voting on levies and tax jurisdictions, as school districts are the main contributors to property tax bills. They also discuss the fairness of property taxes, suggesting a consumption tax might be more equitable. The speaker also mentions the possibility of capping the increase in property taxes in any given year.
➡ The state assesses property values, including homes and airplanes, usually at 90 to 100% of their market value. The assessed value is used to calculate property taxes. If a property’s assessed value increases by more than 15%, it requires an inspection. The property owner can check the details used for the assessment online, and if they disagree with the assessment, they can request a re-inspection or an interior inspection.
➡ The discussion revolves around the issue of property assessments and tax increases. Some homeowners have seen their property taxes rise significantly because their homes were undervalued for years and the government is now adjusting the values. This sudden increase is causing financial strain for homeowners who were unaware of the undervaluation. The speaker argues for a cap on such increases and a better system to keep property assessments up to date to prevent such situations.
➡ The speaker is unhappy with the current property tax system, arguing it’s unfair and illogical. They believe the burden of proof for property value should be on the government, not the taxpayer. They also express concern about the high number of property assessments and the rapid increase in taxes. Despite appreciating the work of the tax office, they believe the system is broken and needs to be fixed.
➡ The discussion revolves around property tax assessments and increases in Clay County. The county officials explain that the increases are due to improvements made to properties and market studies showing homes were undervalued. They also discuss the fairness of the system, with everyone paying taxes based on what they own. The officials appreciate the work done by their staff and discuss potential improvements to the system, such as setting individual tax rates.
➡ The city of Gladstone sets property tax levies based on property classification, which helps to accurately reflect the impact of changes in different property markets. In Missouri, local governments can only increase their revenue by the lesser of the rate of inflation or 5% each year. In 2025, the total new revenue from property taxes is expected to be $550 million. If there was a 15% assessment cap, the local governments would still get a 2.9% increase, but the tax burden would be redistributed among property owners.
➡ The discussion revolves around creating a parks master plan that includes existing and future trails in the cities, with a focus on connectivity. There are concerns about the plan not being implemented and just collecting dust, as well as the need for it to benefit all districts, especially the Western District. The plan will consider the master plans of the cities, and there’s a call for assurance that resources will be available to execute the plan.
➡ The discussion focused on the importance of tax levies and their impact on citizens. The board has consistently lowered tax levies over the years, including a reduction in the surtax and providing property tax relief for seniors. The assessor’s office was recognized for their efforts in working towards lower property taxes. The meeting concluded with the announcement of the county receiving the Distinguished Budget Award for the fourth consecutive year and the observance of Juneteenth.
➡ The discussion revolves around the need for creative investment in park development, particularly through trail connectivity, in the Western district. There’s a desire for a more comprehensive analysis of assets like marinas and golf courses, considering multiple options for their future. The conversation also touches on the importance of citizen input, efficient operation, and funding strategies. Lastly, there’s a suggestion to let the private sector manage certain assets to free up funds for a countywide park system.
➡ The speaker is concerned about the high costs of a project to evaluate the park system, which is budgeted at $250,000. They question the high hourly rates for the project’s staff, with the managing director billing $305 an hour. The speaker believes these rates are excessive and that the government often overpays for services. They argue that taxpayer money should be spent more wisely and that the government should not allow itself to be overcharged.
➡ The county commissioners are debating the cost of a study and the allocation of funds. Some commissioners argue that the money could be better spent on improving roads and other services, while others believe the study is necessary for future planning. They also discuss the effectiveness of private versus public control, citing past experiences. The discussion ends without a clear consensus, but with a shared concern about spending and efficiency.
➡ The commission is discussing a proposal but has many concerns. Some members suggest tabling the discussion until the new county administrator takes office, while others are ready to vote. They discuss the need for more information and clarity on what they’re looking for in the proposal. The commission also acknowledges public input and the hard work of the committee who put the proposal together.
➡ The speaker discusses the importance of the role of the county assessor and the necessity of taxes to fund essential services like schools, police departments, and fire departments. They emphasize that while no one enjoys paying taxes, they are crucial for maintaining the quality of life in the county. The speaker also highlights the growth and attractiveness of Clay county, attributing it to the quality of its services and amenities.
➡ In Clay County, property investments often yield high returns. The assessor’s role is to fairly and accurately value all properties, which influences the county’s ranking in Missouri. The assessor’s office aims to ease tax burdens by suggesting changes to laws when property values increase. The assessor’s job is to determine property values, not to collect taxes, and this is done with fairness and accuracy in mind.
➡ The tax rate is calculated based on the total value of properties in a jurisdiction. There are two types of unfairness in this system: horizontal equity (differences in assessment ratios between property types and areas) and vertical equity (differences in assessment ratios between properties of different values). In Missouri, property taxes fund various public services and are calculated through a two-part process: assessment (identifying and valuing the property) and levy (applying the tax rate). The state constitution requires taxes to be applied uniformly and some properties are exempt from taxation. If a property’s value increases by more than 15%, it must be inspected. The State Tax Commission oversees the assessment process and requires property values to be within 90-110% of fair market value. If a county’s assessments fall outside this range, it could lose funding.

Like. Call this meeting of the Clay County Commission to order. We will begin with our invocation. Mark Willis is here to lead us in prayer. Please come up. Make sure the mic is on, and proceed. Thank you. My name is Mark Willis. I’m the pastor for North Oak Christian Church, a congregation here in Clay county that just celebrated its 50th anniversary of service and worship in our community. And I’m honored to be here tonight. Would you join me in a moment of prayer? Most gracious God, in a time where our divisions seem greater than they ever have, in a time where everyone has their opinion, their perspective and their take, and none of those seem to line up.

Where we all want to talk, but no one wants to listen. In a time where it seems this world wants us to focus on all the ways we are different and separate and isolated. In a time of worrying and anxiety and stress, the work still has to be done. The bills still have to be paid. The projects still have to be finished. So we would ask today that you remind us all of the amazing things we have in common. Remind us of all the ways that we are the same, the ways that we are connected, the ways that we are similar through love, through loss, through life.

We are much, much more alike than we are different. But we lose sight of that. We forget. So remind us, Lord, starting now, tonight in this meeting. Help us to remember what conversation sounds like, what compromise feels like. Remind us that discussion and debate do not have to devolve into screaming tizzies and shouted judgments. Remind us that we do not have to agree in order to exist together, but we do have to see each other, hear each other, recognize each other. Remind us to search for solutions for the greater good for all of our citizens. Remind us that we all live and work in the same community, our community.

Help us to remember and guide us to cut through the static and chaos, to remember that we are all, every one of us, your children. Remind us that you love us all. And through that memory, guide this meeting tonight and future meetings that these chosen to serve would seek to build our future, our life, and our community on common ground. We pray all of this in the name of the One who loves us and who sets us free from our divisiveness. Amen. Thank you. Please join me in the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Please call the roll. Commissioner Nolte? Here. Commissioner Withington? Here. Commissioner Lawson. Here. Commissioner Wagner. Commissioner Johnson. Here. Commissioner Thompson. Here. Commissioner Carpenter. With that, we go to approval of the agenda. Commissioner Johnson, you’re recognized. There you go. Move to approve tonight’s agenda. Motion has been made for the approval of this evening’s agenda discussion. Seeing none you will recognize to close. I close. Please call the roll. Commissioner Johnson. Yes. Commissioner Thompson. Yes. Commissioner Carpenter. Yes. Commissioner Withington? Yes. Commissioner Lawson. Yes. Commissioner Wagner. Aye. Motion passes. Six zero. Next are ceremonial matters. We have one issue on that particular part of our agenda.

Administrator. Yes. We have resolution 2025-181, which is a proclamation recognizing World Elder Abuse awareness day as June 15, 2025. And this evening we have Tina Uridge who is here from senior services and I sure you invite her up and she can talk a little bit about this event. Please come on up and. Absolutely. I will hold it up here for you if you’d like. That way. Perfect. As I said, working to the top of my skill. Okay, thank you so much. Director of Clay County Senior Services. We of course administer the Senior Levy Fund for programs and services for seniors 60 and over.

A lot of our services certainly try to engage older adults with activities, oversight in terms of case management if needed, meals on wheels, transportation, all the services that really help older adults to remain independent and active. We don’t investigate elder abuse claims. That’s not what we do. Although many people think that we are the Department of Health and Senior Services. But we do want to raise awareness of World Elder abuse Awareness Day, June 15. And I brought some statistics to share with everyone in Clay County. In 2024, there were 826 reports of elder abuse in our county alone.

The majority of those are for financial exploitation. I was happy that at one of our meetings last week we had prosecuting attorney Zachary Thomas. Thomas presented at our Falls Coalition. I don’t know if he’s here tonight or not, but he presented on financial scams. And as we all know, it’s growing and we know probably so many of us know people that have been affected by that. So the majority of those 826 calls are through financial exploitation. 43% are self neglect. People that don’t have caregivers, don’t have family, aren’t getting the kind of help that they need.

So it’s important today to raise this awareness. One in ten older Americans are abused or neglected each year and only one in 14 cases of elder abuse ever come to authorities attending. So we’d like to thank labor law enforcement, the Clay county prosecuting attorneys Our local Department of Senior Services that investigates those calls and tries to intervene the best they can. Thank you for this recognition and awareness. Thank you for being here. And I’ll go to our recognized commissioners as they seek recognition, if they would like to speak on this. But obviously, we’ve known each other for quite a while.

This is one of the first issues that I became involved with when I entered public life. And I have been very impressed with not only yourself, but also the organization. It’s just. It’s a wonderful thing to see how you reach out to seniors on a whole host of issues. I remember the File of Life. That was a really great thing. So often we come across things in our line of work where you have a senior who has been either taken advantage of or scammed one way or another. And we all have those stories. I had one where I talked to a couple, and the gentleman was being put into a facility because his Alzheimer’s had gotten just that bad.

And someone had come along, and this lady was probably in her 80s, early 80s, and this person had convinced them to put their life savings into a financial instrument that would not mature and not be accessible for 30 years. That was unconscionable. And what I did was I came back here to the county and I talked to the prosecuting attorney. I talked to a number of people here. They reached out, and we went to the state and we went to Illinois, where this company was. Long story short is that she was able to be made. The situation was resolved, and she was able to get access to that money.

Otherwise, she could not have taking care of her elderly husband. And like I say, every one of us could come up with many stories of that sort. And the fact that we are able to take advantage of this day, of this, of this occasion, and to highlight what goes on at Senior Services is something that I think is great. And I just want to say how much we appreciate what you do and all the people on your staff, but also the people that we put in place for the board. It’s one of those things that I think we all agree on the need for.

We all agree that we need to have good people in there. And it is very heartwarming to see so many people willing to put themselves out there and to actually help people in need, whether they are paid staff or whether they are volunteers. So thank you for leading that effort. I just have to say that last month you appointed Bill to Taylor to our board. He’s already been to three events and hasn’t even attended a board meeting. He was a good man. He has been sworn in though. Would any other commissioners wish to be recognized? It looks like not so.

We will come down and we will present you with the honorary resolution. Wonderful. Thank you. 1, 2, 3. Thank you. Always a pleasure to acknowledge the good works of Clay county citizens. And this is no exception by any stretch. That concludes ceremonial matters. Next are public comments. Are there any members of the public who would like to comment on any issues to the commission? Seeing none. That brings us to our consent agenda Administrator. The consent agenda allows the commission to act upon items considered to be routine and approved in one motion. These may include items that have been reviewed by the commission in a prior session.

There will be no separate discussion unless a commissioner requests that an item be removed from the consent agenda and considered separately. There are nine items on the consent agenda this evening. The first item is approval of the commission meeting minutes of June 5th. Resolution 2025183 is approving invoice payments for Clay county from the period of May 31 to June 6. There are 257 invoices totaling $1,434,118.04. Resolution 2025185 approving a road in Northbrook Farms into the county road system and release letter of credit. Resolution 2025192 is approved proposal for county pavement marking in 2025 with Heartland Traffic Services.

Resolution 2025189 is approved order agreement for copier printer lease for the law Enforcement resource center with RICO. Resolution 2025194 is approve a cooperative perch service agreement for hazardous waste disposal and recycling services as needed throughout the county with Heritage Environmental Services. Resolution 2025190 is approving a grant application for Missouri Department of Natural Resources playground scrap metal grant. Resolution 2025193 approving a memorandum of understanding between the North Kansas City School District and the county of clay for the 202526 school year for resource officer. And resolution 2025188 is approving appointment to the opioid settlement Oversight committee. Commissioner Johnson move to approve tonight’s consent agenda.

Motion is made for the approval of this evening’s consent agenda. Is there any discussion? Seeing none. You are recognized to close. I close. Please call the roll. Commissioner Johnson? Yes. Commissioner Thompson? Yes. Commissioner Carpenter? Yes. Commissioner Withington? Yes. Commissioner Lawson? Yes. Commissioner Wagner? Aye. Motion passes. Six zero. That brings us to our regular agenda. First item on this evening’s Regular agenda is 2025, 184. Administrator Resolution 2025184 is approving invoice payments for the Clay County Prosecutor’s office from May 31 through June 6. There are four invoices totaling $3,625. 28. Any discussion? Any questions? Commissioner Johnson. Move to approve 2025.

184. Motion has been made for the approval of 2025 184. Is there any discussion? Seeing none. You’re recognized. To close. To close. Please call the roll. Commissioner Johnson. Yes. Commissioner Thompson. I recuse myself. Commissioner Carpenter. Yes. Commissioner Withington? Yes. Commissioner Lawson. Yes. Commissioner Wagner. Aye. Motion passes. Five in favor, one recusal. Next on our regular agenda is 2025 Ordinance 15. Administrator 2025. Ordinance 15 is the reappropriate and revise the adopted budget for the current year in the amount of $39,572. Moving to an expenditure line to purchase an ATV, a UTV and trailer for use at Smithville Lake by the sheriff’s office.

Captain Aghdarian is here to provide information to the commission. Please proceed. Good evening, commissioners. Captain Amy Agdarian, Clay County Sheriff’s Office. I will keep this short and sweet. The sheriff’s office sold several items at auction. Most notably was a patrol boat that was docked at Smithville Lake that we no longer use to patrol the lake. And rather than keep that piece of equipment not in service, we are asking to reappropriate the sale of those. The proceeds of the sale of those items to this year’s budget so that we can purchase an atv, a UTV and the trailer for those two items to patrol the area around the lake.

So that’s. That’s our ask, Commissioner Johnson. Oh, yeah. Commissioner Johnson. Move to approve 2025 Ordinance 15. Motion has been made for approval of 2025 Ordinance 15. Any discussion? Seeing none, you will recognize the close. Close. You call the roll, Commissioner Johnson? Yes. Commissioner Thompson? Yes. Commissioner Carpenter. Yes. Commissioner Withington? Yes. Commissioner Lawson? Yes. Commissioner Wagner. Motion passes. Six zero. The next and final issue on the Regular agenda is 2025 187. Administrator Resolution 2025187 is approving RFP 3025 with a separate CMH government in clay County, Missouri Parks, Recreation and Historic sites for a master plan and strategic plan.

And Director Davis is here to talk to the commission about the process and about the master plan. Please proceed. John Davis, Parks Director. And tonight we’re here to request to approve a contract with vendor for develop a new master plan. I’d like to go over background of the current one that we operate off of. One moment please. Commissioner Withington, do you have a. Okay. Very well. You’ll be first up then please proceed. Yes, sir. Current master plan was developed by Booker, Willis and Ratliff Company that was adopted by the Clay County Commission November 23rd, 2003. 22 years ago, population of Clay county at 2003 was 184,000 according to the population census of 2020.

Now it’s 259,000. It’s 441% increase. Over 75,000 people are added to the county since that time. These are three issues that were evaluated in that original master plan. The findings, citizen support for trails continuation of our core services at that time was historic sites, Smithville lakes, anemones and the golf courses. The recommendations of that plan that were adopted then? Well, first was they adopted the plan, then they developed a marketing plan and then they emphasized the capital improvements. What didn’t they do? They did not adopt a fee schedule, revenue streams and a green spaces ordinance. Why? We don’t know.

Because it’s so old and their staff’s limitabilities of finding out why. Exactly. And they did recommend partnerships, whether it be public, private, so on and so forth. And that has been accomplished. You know, here is a list of some of our partnerships. As you can see, there’s many and there’s probably some that I forgot, but not unrecognized. What did they. What were some of the majors accomplishments? They did have a marketing plan at that time. Still have had several ever since then. They did acquire the Ferris Farm historic site. We completed or started a lot of trail construction.

You know, we have 37 miles of multipurpose use, trail bike riding, hiking, 11 mountain bike trails and 32 miles of equestrian trails. At that time there was also recommendations done to paradise or construction upgrades to Paradise Point Marina and the golf course complex master plan. Now that’s we’re asking for a 10 year roadmap of where we’re going. What’s our goals, what’s our vision, what do our citizens need? You know, we’re asked this company that we’re going to talk to is what public input is our major goal. I mean things have changed in 22 years. You know, populations increased by 41%.

You know, there’s age group changes, there’s ethnicity changes in the county, there’s financial status different in the county. Recreation Trends have changed 22 years later. So we need the data. We keep us going and other things such as applying to natural you know, keeping in line with national standards of other parks departments around us. The strategic plan, that’s the five year plan. That’s how we’re going to what our mark is. And the five year mark, it sets the tasks or goals for that point and how we’re keeping up with the master plan. The timeline of this project.

In March, we sent out the rfp. It was distributed after it was, you know, reviewed by the park board and their recommendation, administration, all that is sent out. We received eight bids. We have an evaluation committee, seven people that consisted of myself, three park board members, Bud Wackerley, David Mecklenburg, Sheila Lillis. Sheila’s here tonight. Also planning zoning director Kip Jones, and Savannah Vogelmot with trails maintenance, and Beth Beckett with historic sites Committee picked three finalists. And tonight we recommend CHM government services. Before I get questions, I do have Mike Bell with rdg. He is a partner with chm.

The president, Jeff Bakey, could not be here tonight with chm. He had a prior commitment. So. Commissioner within. Did you have a question or comment? Yeah, question. Can I. Can I talk? Yep, you’re recognized. Thank you. Okay, so can you tell us what percentage of the 20, 20, the goals and initiatives of the 2000, 2003 plan that were actually achieved? The percentage rate? No, I can give you like we went through this list right here. They adopted that plan. You know, they’ve. We’ve continued to do. Can upgrade the animities. We have our historic sites, our golf course, our lakes.

You know, we’ve continued that. We’ve developed the trails. I don’t have the percentage rate. Okay, well, would you say it was 50% or more? Probably. That’s not. It’s a very hard document to read. Okay. And it’s a lot of statistics in that document. Population. You know, they’ve surveyed the public, their opinions, they’ve surveyed the staff, they surveyed government officials, just like this one will do, but more. Okay, so what is the exact, exact scope of this? Where we. What. What parks area are we looking at? All of our parks. So when you say all of our county parks.

Okay, so I could probably save this county $250,000. I can tell you right now, they want a better golf course. They want more capacity at the boat docks. I mean, I don’t. So I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I know I’ve shared with this commission a lot that I think we need to revisit our entire park system. Are we going to continue to have a rural park plan or are we going to have A park plan that’s encompass the entire county. Is it possible to include looking at how we can integrate the entire trail system in this county and look at how we can with this? Yes, this is getting public input.

So your input as well. So when I say, say that are we, we’re going to look at how we can incorporate Kansas City trail plan to this because you said it was only going to be looking at the county parks. Yes, this is public input. If I could clarify. But part of the scope will be the existing trails that exist in the cities. Plus what are their long term plans. Those will all be taken into consideration because again, how do you have connectivity? We’ve always said be able to get on a bike and ride it all the way up to Smithville Lake.

How do you make that happen? So it is partnering because a lot of our recreation will not stop at unincorporated area into municipality. So it will be from that perspective, it will be more holistic. So are we going to be meeting with all the local municipalities too? Yes, it can be in that this plan. Yes. Because I know most of those municipalities already have plans in place. They do. And so do we have a trail plan in place or is this redo, is this just for the parks or is this going to include an entire trail master plan for the county also? This is a parks master plan.

Trails are part of the parks. So it’s part of this plan. Okay, I mean that’s reassuring. But I do have a lot of concerns that this is just going to be another document that sits on a bookshelf and just collects dust. Especially when you said that the last one maybe got 50% completed. It’s 22 years. I know the first 10 years, you know they usually most parks plans are 10 years old, but I would hope that we’d have more than 50% completed in 20 something years. Agreed. And I don’t know the percentage and like I say, it’s a difficult document to read and it’s pretty kind of vague, you know.

But I’ll assure you this, it’s not my way I like to operate is put it on a shelf. It’s my job to make sure we, we get this document and we proceed with it. And if I don’t do that, it’s the person sitting in this position. And it’s also your alls to make sure that I do it. And that’s our goal. We don’t want to waste it. So my biggest concern is we’re going to consider continue to spend money that’s going to only benefit the Eastern District. I want to see us start implementing a parks plan in the Western District, too.

I mean, the western people, citizens, they pay taxes, too, but they see very little benefits from the county other than we have a aging annex that we’re trying to close. So. And I think the Western District. So I want to see if we, if I do vote for this, I want to see a lot of emphasis put on the eastern or the Western District and how we can incorporate all those trails and the park systems in Gladstone, North Kansas City and Kansas City. Okay. And are you telling me that that will be done? It is going to have citizen input and we will have, so we know how citizen turnout is.

Are you telling me, though, if we vote for this, that this, that that will be. Because if I don’t have any assurances, I’m going to vote no tonight. I want assurances right now that regardless of citizen input, this plan will look at the Western District 2. So again, it will incorporate the master plans that the city have. Right. Especially when it comes to their trail systems. And so whether we have public from the western that show up for the public meetings, there will be that dialogue with the cities and also looking at their master plans. And how do you connect in the Western District? In the Western District, yeah, we’re talking about North Kansas City.

We’re talking about Gladstone, Kansas City. In that area. Yes. Okay. Commissioner Wagner, thank you. I share many of the trepidations expressed by my colleague, so I’ll kind of throw these out. And the organization that’s been chosen can choose to deal with these comments when they come up for comments. It seems to me the way you get away from the issue of plans on shelves is one to your comment, John, we have to be prepared to execute. And to me, one of the ways you execute is making sure that you have resources available to execute with, whether it’s a trail plan or any other set of amenities that may come out of this sort of document.

And as we spoke about this before, we talked about funding options that we already know that we do have. And I would suggest, and certainly recommend that at such time as something comes forward that we put some thought as to how we fund activities. Otherwise, yes, this will gather dust. And 20 years from now, someone will come in your role and there will be people in these seats and will wonder, why didn’t this happen? And maybe I’ll just leave a note and put it underneath the desk here to say pull when this comes back in 20 years.

Here’s your answer. So I would Simply advise and throw out there that it is a waste of money if we have no intention to fund improvements. Right. But I believe that to the comment earlier that we want to see connectivity to other communities, especially in the Western District. I share that feeling and I, and I, and I say all that to the group that may receive a contract. Let me know. It indicates that there’s a five year strategic plan. I would hope that within that strategic plan it identifies what projects should come forward and should further suggest cost and should further suggest perhaps a plan of finance.

I think if you have all of those things and you have something to work with, if you don’t have those things, you don’t. And so I do intend to vote for this because I know that a 20 year plan is just going to continue to gather dust. But if there is some feeling that we are as a group prepared to fund improvements, when we have those improvements identified, then that can be money very well spent which can enhance what our, our communities here in Clay county has. So you don’t have to, you can deal with the diatribe I just gave you, John, or you could wait for the other groups.

But that’s all I got. So thank you. I would add one thing this commission has talked about and Commissioner Wagner talked briefly about it is what is the cost recovery? What is the philosophy when it comes to cost recovery of programs, whether it’s at the marinas, whether it is, you know, at the golf course, what does that look like? And those are philosophical discussions and going that the commission will establish and the consultant’s role is. Then if that’s the goal, then again, what’s the roadmap to get there and what are the options? You know, John had on his slide a couple back about the current existing things that didn’t accomplish.

Well, three of those top things were recommendations to identify funding sources to do those projects. And those funding sources never came to fruition for whatever reason at that time. So I think that kind of plays into both comments about what did we not get done and why didn’t we get it done. Commissioner Lawson, I gotta say 250, of course, sticks in my throat. I can barely form the words. I would say this while I know that the golf course, the lake trails, a lot of that is on the eastern side. Go up there to the lake and you see probably people from all over the county that are enjoying it as well as people from Johnson county and some other places that come up to use it.

So it does help the entire county. But I do think when we talk about in being inclusive with Gladstone, as we should, Kansas City, Missouri and some of our other communities. The negative I see there is we can say we want to, you know, incorporate into your trails, with our trails, but what they want decide to do isn’t always going to agree with what we want to do, you know, but I. I feel that we can’t tell those people what to do, even if we’re bringing money to them and helping build the trails and make the connectivity we need.

But I would say this. I think that there’s a heck of a lot of better way. Nothing against you, John. I think you’re a great guy, but I think there’s a lot better way with can use that $250,000 than to do a study, another study. We’ve done a lot of studies at a lot of cost to the people of this county. And roads aren’t getting fixed and other things aren’t getting done that should get done instead of this kind of thing. So I don’t have a real good feel about it. I think it’s a lot of money and I have concerned concerns, as does Commissioner Withington, that this plan will actually be put into play and we’ll see some very positive things come out of it.

I don’t think you can convince me of that. That’s just one person. Commissioner Carpenter, thank you. Thank you, John. Appreciate the presentation and the information. Look forward to getting the results of this thing. I do want to chime in in terms of the Western district piece. I certainly want to co sign to both Commissioner Wagner and Withinton’s comments. I would love for us to come up with creative ways to, you know, invest some of the parks dollars there. And I think probably the most intuitive way to do that is via trail connectivity, you know, partnering with the municipalities.

So I do hope to see that too. Obviously, the vast majority of our spending, as you know, in our park system has been up at Smithville Lake over the years, a couple other places as well, but a big, big majority at Smithville. And of course we’re proud of those amenities. We love that we have them great for the community. But having a more expanded role across the county is. Is a goal of mine as well. So I’d love to see that incorporated. And then one other request I would have is just what I would hope as part of this examination is, you know, we’ve discussed some of our assets before and what the future of them should look like.

I guess my hope is that whatever analysis is done takes a well rounded examination of things like the marina, the golf course, et cetera, that might suggest multiple options in terms of things we could do as opposed to just really expensive ones that commit us to significant funding of those operations on an increasing basis. And it’s not just, I need to elaborate, it’s not just public impact put getting voice of our citizens, our patrons, but this company also analyzes our fees, our contracts, our policies, our procedures, our assets, you know, and looks through everything and gives us a, you know, how are we going to operate efficiently through this future? How are we going to fund these things for the future? So it’s a lot more than just citizen input.

It’s important, you know, how are we going to fund all this and keep. Got one. Yeah. Good deal. Well, I again appreciate your work on it also. I see Sheila back there. Sheila, thank you for your work on the selection committee and everybody who, you know, worked on that. Hopefully we’ll get some good information out of this and to our fellow commissioners, points up will be able to put it to work. And it is a good reminder, I think, that Commissioner Wagner made that things cost money and, you know, we should always keep that in mind when making decisions around the tax revenue side of things, too, because it’s easy to want things to be nicer and also to pay less for things to be nicer.

And often those things don’t go together very well. So appreciate your work on this, like I said, and look forward to seeing what comes next. Thanks, Commissioner Wagner. Thank you. Thank you. And I’m hopefully not going to go too far down a rabbit hole, but a couple of comments to, I guess from what has been said to illustrate what I hope is how granular this study gets you. Take the trails example, a perfect example. And I know my colleague will know Searcy Creek Trail. And where is it supposed to go? It’s supposed to end up at Hodgepodge park, just about like every other trail is supposed to, at least as it was discussed 20 years ago at some point.

But to accomplish that, you got to go through Clay Como, and I am not aware if that right of way has ever been established or brought into play. And I guess I use it as a great example to suggest that if indeed the public is saying we want trails and if we are saying we want connect activity that goes into the Western District, then at some point issues like how do you, how do you extend those trails from the city of Kansas City through another municipality into another municipality that will then connect to the county through county property, all the way up to Smithville Lake.

That’s super granular. But if I’m going to spend $250,000, I would at least like to have some idea of what that might look like. Right. So that’s one example. Another example. And I think the point is we’ll take it about cost recovery, because when we’ve talked about everything related to marinas and golf courses, I think understanding what we should expect. So, for example, should a golf course that we operate have 100% cost reduction? I think there’s an argument for that, that that is true. How do you do that? We’ve talked about the marina, and when we had that discussion, we were talking about, you know, we got to get rid of H, because H is just a hole and nobody wants it, but they’re taking advantage of that opportunity yet to put a plan of finance together for that.

What is our expected cost recovery for that? Is it 10 years, 20 years, whatever the case may be? So. So I don’t mean to go down that rabbit hole too far, but just to express, at least in my opinion, the sort of granularity that I hope we get out of this. And I’m just kind of. I’m putting on the contractor. That’s the sort of thing that I think we should expect, because those are the sorts of things that then become actionable that you can then begin to put a dollar amount to and a plan of finance behind to go do it.

So I’ll. My last diatribe. I should probably leave the room before I make another. But I do want to express, I think these are the sorts of issues that would be important for us to get out of a document like that. Commissioner Lawson, you know, that brings up a very interesting point. I usually don’t agree with you, but on this I do. What’s today and what time is it? Yeah, you know, that’s the. The thing I think would clear your mind a little bit more is that. Is it saying in here, what steps are you going to take to try to get the connectivity that is necessary to build that big plan? Do we have a right of way in Claycomo? Do we have all these things that’s not even touched in here? And maybe that’s the way it is.

These guys just go off and they come up with some fantastic plan. But I think we should have input, more input in that. I don’t know how much input was given them, but in here, and I apologize, I have not read the entire document, does it specifically say, these are the things we are interested in? We know need to improve our marina, expand our marina. That’s. People came and told us that’s what they wanted to do. What have we done about it? Not yet anything. But I realize it’s only been a couple weeks, but. So it’s going to be the same thing with the trails.

We’d like to see that. That completed trail plan that everybody’s talked about, as far as I know, for 20 damn years. So when are we going to see that focused on heavily with more detail, the same way with the lake or anything else that we want to do. So I think that this is good in concept, but I think it needs. For me, there needs to be more detail, and maybe it’s hidden in there somewhere and I didn’t see it, but I’m not seeing some of the things I’d like to see. Commissioner Withington, can we get that granular in this? Can we get assurance that that’s how granular we are? So at that, you know, we need to look at all of our park projects.

We just don’t have trails. We’ve got historic sites. We’ve got campgrounds. There’s a lot of stuff we have. And I understand that. I’m looking at this from a Western district perspective, though. You know, the Western district is probably one of the least walkable areas, but what we have an abundance of is green space with trails that can connect our schools where kids can’t currently walk to school because the neighborhood’s been deemed unsafe. So if we can. Unsafe for walking. So if we can start partnering with our municipalities, and you’re right, Clay Como is probably the. The biggest part of the Searcy Creek.

The Searcy Creek area. So that’s something. But, you know, I’m just gonna say for the record, I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. You know, if we get out of the marina business, we get out of the golf course business, we get out of the airport business and let the private sector step in, we’d have a lot of money to have a countywide park system. I don’t know what our budget is, but if we got out, let the private sector step in, because, you know, the private sector is not going to let that stuff go to waste.

You know, there’s. There’s assets. Private sector can turn a profit. We can focus on core government functions. I’m just going to throw that out there again. I know I’m like beating a dead horse with that, but I’m going to keep saying it every time I Think this county could have a world class park system county wide, not just in the eastern district, but it would take us having a partner and that would be a funding source if we didn’t want to raise the property, the park property levy. So, Commissioner Johnson, thank you. So, a couple of comments and concerns.

I’m always concerned about how we spend our money. You know, when government, how do I say this? The government’s often overbilled for stuff. You hear the stories about, you know, you want to buy a hammer. If the government buys a hammer, it cost them 200 bucks for that hammer. If I go to Home Depot, it cost me 15 bucks for that exact same hammer. This particular deal, the budget is $250,000. Yes, sir. And the bid came in at $249,900, coincidentally. That’s too much of a coincidence for me, by the way. But I’m looking at some of the costs on the sheet here.

I’m on page 10 of 23 on the, On the rfp. Do you have that with you? Yes, sir. If you go to page 10 of 23, I’m looking at the hourly rates. If you can explain that to me, just convince me that, okay. That this is a good thing. The first one, it says the managing director is going to be paid $305 an hour. Tell me about that. That comes out to. If that’s, if that’s, if that’s a full time job, that comes out to like $635,000 a year. Are we paying someone $305,000 an hour for this project, to manage this project? And maybe someone from CMH needs to answer that.

We can bring Mike Bell and maybe. Are you saying it’s my hourly rate? No, I certainly don’t think. Think that it is. Well, you tell me what it’s saying. It’s Saying Managing Director, 305. Could you please speak the microphone so we can all hear? Sorry about that. Thank you. I’m sorry. So each, each of us have billable rates. Each of us will allocate certain hours to a project. I think Jeff, the person who you’re referring to, will handle all of the marketing, the financing and the investment piece. That I think is absolutely critical to you. You know, I grew up working for parks and then I flipped over to this side and what we typically didn’t have is a real financial plan of how we move forward.

And that’s Jeff’s. He’s a national leader in that. That’s where he’ll spend his time and resource on that piece I bill at about $170 an hour. I will handle all of the infrastructure and trail systems and literally get down to the nuts and bolts of how do we get from point A to point B and what are the obstacles to get through. And you need to do this, this, this and this to get through obstacle A, obstacle B, obstacle C, obstacle D, we will get that granular for that and then he’ll come back in and figure out what the financing of that piece would be.

Okay, so just for clarification, we’re going to pay Jeff $305 an hour, is that what you’re saying? He will bill at $305 an hour. I don’t have those numbers in front of me. He’s going to bills at $305. And then the st. The manager, so that’s the managing direct and the manager is going to bill us 165. At 165 an hour. Yeah, again, I don’t have those numbers in front of me. The associates bill at 120 an hour, principal’s bill at 175 an hour. The principal bills at 290 an hour, the partner bills at 175. And the cheap specialists, they only make 150 bucks an hour.

So when you say make 150 bucks an hour, I don’t make $160 an hour. I make something much less. You know, you understand the. But that’s what we’re getting billed for. That’s what you’re getting billed for. And so what we would do the first thing with our committee and sit down and work out a year long plan of who’s coming on certain times, what the response before he will touch the project and allocate the need for action items to his staff to actually implement it. So here’s my concern, and this isn’t directly specific to you, but what often happens is, you’ll see, okay, the county has a budget of $250,000 for this.

So let’s work backwards. How we can fill up, how we can take this $250,000. In this case, it’s $249,900 that you’re going to bill for this. So that’s what your cost is for this. And so it looks like now, okay, so we’ll take hourly rates and kind of work those backwards. I mean, these are crazy rates. These are crazy billable rates. Like I said, the lowest billable rate is $150 an hour. I would never pay this kind of money to someone to come, you know, do this kind of stuff for me. And so my question is, in government, we often do this.

We just don’t even look at the numbers and we say, okay, oh, sure, yeah, yeah, we’ll do this. We got $250,000. We spent $250,000 on it, but we’re billing, getting billed $305 an hour for the managing director, and apparently the managing director doesn’t make the that much money, so the company’s just pocketing the rest of it. Apparently. This is taxpayers money. This is taxpayers dollars. And does it really cost $250,000, in your case, $249,900 to evaluate our park system for us, or can we get the park system evaluated for $150,000 or $100,000? I guess that’s my question.

We put together a scope of service based on what you asked for. I believe we actually came in higher than that. And we cut back because we want to work within this county, within the series of communities. Yeah, I know. So you interviewed a series of firms. I don’t know what each one of them billed at. I just don’t know. I know that what we were asked to do, we identified the tasks, the responsible parties, and that’s the number that we forwarded through in the submittal of the proposal and the interview. Yes. So, and my real concern is, again, this is not directed at you.

This is general. How government works is like if government wants a hammer, everyone’s going to come in with a $200 bid, plus for a hammer, for government. For some reason, nobody’s going to come to government say, you know what, it’s only $15 hammer. I’ll give it to you for 16. So I make a buck off it. People don’t do that with government, and yet government allows that to happen. That’s why that’s happening. I think, and I’m looking at you, I should be looking at everybody else, we allow that to happen, which I don’t think we should allow to happen.

You know, if this hammer is worth 200 bucks, then we’ll pay 200 bucks. But if it’s not, then we won’t. I think that’s where the real evaluation has to come in. Not just, hey, because everybody else is jacking up the price as much, we might just say, you know what? If everybody else is going to be jacking up the price of $200 hammer, you know, we just won’t use a hammer. We’ll go make our own hammer. We’ll get our own tools to use to do this job with. I think at some point we have to look at.

Government has to look at, you know what? We got to stop playing this game where we keep getting raked over the coals for money when this is taxpayers dollars. I would not spend this kind of money if this was my own budget. I wouldn’t do that. And so I’m real concerned about that. And I get. We’ve spent this kind of money before. Another. What are we calling this thing? A study. Other studies which I think were, okay, we just did a salary study which was about the same price. It’s funny how most of the studies coming about $250,000.

We just did a salary study, which I think was fair. I think that was appropriate. I think that was needed. And I think I know the work that goes into those. I’ve been through a few of those. Okay, I get that might have been a little overpriced, but I get. And actually they came way under budget. They came way under that amount, actually, if I’m not mistaken. Yeah. About 175, I think, is what they came in at, which was good. But that’s my. That’s my real concern with this. It isn’t so much the details of this, of what they’re going to do or not do.

And I agree with Joanne that there’s a lot of stuff up here. A lot of the stuff in the county when it comes to parks and recreation type stuff is in the Eastern District, you know, in Smithville Lake and all the trails and all that kind of stuff. But my bigger issue is we have to stop letting government get gouged. I think that’s really our responsibility. Stop letting government get gouged and let people that are going to come to government say. Because private sector. If private sector looked at this, I think it’d be a completely different story.

I think it’d be a completely different story. And I. Anyways, that’s where I am on this. I’m concerned about that. I’m concerned about that we allow this to happen in government on a regular basis when we don’t have to. But again, I don’t claim to know everything about this, so I’ll just throw that out there, see if that stirs up any more discussion. Commissioner Lawson? Yeah, just a couple points. We actually did have the marina under private control at one time, and it went to nothing. I mean, it was in horrible shape, deplorable shape because of a private person.

So that’s something I would Disagree with you on love. But back to this. Like I said at the beginning, we have got, we’ve got to take care of a lot of things in this county. And I as much as Commissioner Johnson as well Commissioner Thompson, we get the calls on a weekly basis that the roads are bad, my road’s bad, it’s falling apart, you know, holes big enough to take down a tire. And we hear that all the time and we try to keep up with that and it’s a nightmare to do it. When I see the need for something like that.

Whether it’s that or it’s something on the other side of the county that we can participate in and make it a better place to live. I find it unbelievably difficult to spend this kind of money for a study. You know, I cry babied. The only one crybabying about the study on the salaries and I’m still complaining about that. I’ll always complain about it. It was a huge amount of money and this is the same way. Study, study, study. That’s all well and good if you’ve got extra money to play with, but I don’t see us having that much money to, to utilize for this.

We did the comprehensive plan. I don’t know what that cost us, but that was almost a have to situation. This to me is not a have to situation. I’d rather see some of this us become a dust free county, get some roads taken care of and some other services that we can take care of versus doing something like this. In my mind, I can’t justify this kind of money for this study. Commissioner Carpenter, thank you. Quickly, I’ll say I tend to agree with Commissioner Worthington on the remarks. For me, anytime it’s a non core government function.

I think finding a private sector free market solution is preferable and I’m open to it anytime, anytime. Other folks are as well. I also want to agree with Commissioner Johnson strongly. You know, first thing that caught my eye was 249, 940 and I’m just not sure what the solution is to your point. I share your concern deeply on this particular occasion. And this is why I brought up the bid process before I was graduating to see we had eight bids. I was gratified to see we had a strong selection committee. I called out Sheila Lewis earlier.

You know, she’s been doing parks work for many decades in this county and others sat on that selection committee as well. So that gives me some peace of mind that at least out of eight, which is a pretty fulsome number of bids. They were closely examined by talented people, and this was the one selected. That being said, you know, 249,940. When it’s 250, you know, too much for me as well. I agree. The government gets massively overcharged and we have a lot of inefficiencies, and I would love to do something about it. That’s where the hard part comes in, though, because I’m just not sure exactly what that is.

That’s just me humbly admitting that fact. So I’m glad that we share the concern. I think we should keep talking about it. And one thing I know that helps is when we get a goodly number of bids in, we can at least know that we had some selection, you know, some selection space to make the best possible deal. And we at least have that here for what it’s worth. But I think we should keep talking about it. Thanks. Thank you. One of the observations that I share with the commissioner here, Commissioner Johnson, is that it’s a lot of money for those hourly rates.

Now, whether they are built in, whether they are then passed on, I don’t know. I think we should know. But the point is this. At this moment, I semi care whether or not the private sector pays less or whether other governments pay too much. What I’m worried about now is what does Clay county pay? And those prices seem really high to me, and I would like to see a lot of justification because I don’t see it happening. So, I mean, that rings a really strong bell and I would like to. There’s got to be a knowable industry standard.

And if that’s knowable industry standard, I am quite surprised. So, yeah, I have some really heavy concerns about that. Not just the overall budget, but when you’re looking at the line items, I think we need a lot more. A lot more explanation as to exactly how these numbers were reached. And quite honestly, we’ve waited some time to do the new study. I don’t see waiting a little longer as being a particular issue if that means being able to negotiate or to get a better deal. So I’m looking for what the consensus of the commission is. Obviously, we have the issue before us on the floor, so there will be, I assume, some sort of action taken one way or the other.

But I do share the concern that we are. This is not really an emergency kind of situation. You could say the salary study had more urgency to it. There was. There was a reason for that. And so I would like to have maybe a Little more contemplation on this. Also, I want to share Commissioner Lawson’s observation that while I am a fan of free enterprise and the private sector, they don’t always. There is no 100%. And you’re right, there were extremely serious problems with the docs that you and I both experienced and we both went out and looked at and holes in the docks, all kinds of things that were not acceptable.

So I think it’s not so much a focus on whether we do it through private or public means. Let’s just try to do it right. Let’s just try to do it in a cost effective manner that serves the folks that we are here to represent. With that. Commissioner Wagner, thank you. My new diatribe. So 20 years ago I was in a similar situation where I worked for an agency and went to a number of clients asking them to pay for me and the rest of the agency to do stuff. The question that’s been asked, well, what does this pay for? Well, it pays for salary.

It pays for benefits at the company they work for. It pays for FICA because something’s got to go to Social Security and Medicaid or Medicare and everything else. So I totally agree that you do not get paid what is on here. You get paid something less and hopefully you have enough clients out there that altogether provides a salary that you enjoy every year. That was my experience. I don’t think much has changed in 20 years. But at the end of the day, unless you think we have the expertise in house to perform what was put out on an rfp, then you’ve got to go out and pay for it and you’re paying for the expertise to come forward.

I do see the connectivity to the 250,000 and maybe there’s causality there, I don’t know. But what I do know is that we have paid for expertise for any number of items for documents that, that are in some cases 20 years old. And here we have assets that we’re talking about. And what’s contemplated here is not only how do you use your current assets, but how do you develop other assets into the future? I would venture to say that if anyone came forward other than who has been selected, we would have a similar conversation. Because I would probably guess there’s a similar pricing strategy structure, perhaps for the reason that was given earlier.

But nevertheless, if we’re ordering a hammer, I have a feeling that these types of hammers are very similar. And whether it’s ball peen or clawback, whatever you want, or the hammer drill Whatever you want, you’re going to pay for something similar. If you want the sort of expertise to tell you how you should be using your assets into the future. Is it a lot? Yes. Have we seen similar numbers? Yes. And I think if you went anywhere else outside of the county or county staff, you will see something similar to me. The question is, do I want that expertise to tell me how to use my asset? My answer is, yes, I do.

And it’s just that simple for me. So sorry. Thanks. Commissioner Withington. I just to want. Want to say I think our citizens do deserve the best park amenities. You know, you guys can argue that things were bad when the private sector was doing it, but I’ll just say that according to the people at the marina now, it hasn’t really improved much. Hey, I know you and I will say that, but I’m just telling you what the users up there say. They say something completely different. I agree with Commissioner Wagner. I don’t think that this is a big deal.

You know, we’re not in a hurry to get this done. I. I wouldn’t make. I wouldn’t be opposed. So if we have to vote tonight, I’m gonna vote no. I have too many concerns. But I wouldn’t be opposed to tabling this until our next county administrator takes office in 11 days. And maybe he can weigh in or, you know, we can have another discussion about this, but I wouldn’t be opposed to table. I think there’s a lot of people up here that have too many concerns, and that’s just where I’m at. Commissioner, if you do carry to table, obviously I will recognize you for that motion.

However. Well, I’d like to see what other people think first. That was what I. And I also wanted to make sure that there are a number of people who may not be familiar with parliamentary procedure, but once a motion’s been been made to table, it stops discussion. So I appreciate you giving us a headline. That’s why they make the motion. I just said I would be open to that idea. Very good. I just want to make sure that those here from the public understood what you were trying to say. Is there anyone else who’d care to comment as far as the commission goes? Oh, I’m sorry, Commissioner Wagner just on a roll, so why not? So clearly we don’t have to take action this evening.

I would just simply say if. If we are going to table, then it needs to be clear as to what needs to be answered. I suspect, and it’s only a suspicion that even if we delay until our new administrator gets here, you’ll probably come to the very same conclusion and then we’ll have the same discussion. And so I feel like if that is the action that we wish to take, I think we need to be very clear as to what it is that we are looking for in order to make a decision. Yay or nay, down the road.

Otherwise. Otherwise we could just go up and down. Up or down this evening. But I want to be fair to the recommended contractor, I want to be fair to John and staff that if that is route we go, we need to be clear on what we’re looking for. Yeah. So for me personally, I. I mean, I’m fine with that. If we wanted to have an up or down vote today, I’m fine. You want to turn on your mic? My mic is on. It’s on. Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, it is. Thank you. If. I mean, if the commission wanted to have an up and down vote tonight, I.

That’s fine. I just, I have a lot of concerns on. You know, I don’t think this is as important of a plan as our planning and zoning plan that we implement or that we paid for two years ago. I don’t think this is as important of a plan as the one we did, you know, last year for the salary study. I mean, seriously, I could fix all of our problems if you want to pay me 250,000. People want better golf course, they want more capacity at the boats or at the marina. Problem solved. You know, but I just.

I have too many concerns about this. Sorry, commission. Lawson. Yeah, I. Here’s what I’d like to see us do. I don’t want to. In good conscience. I can’t vote to use citizens money for this study at this time. But what I would like to see is that we all really sit down with this thing, scrutinize it, find out where the holes are in our minds, highlight what we want to discuss, put in the things we want to put in, and then maybe come back and look at it in a better light with everybody having inputs, some information, or have a meeting, you know, with the consulting company and discuss what the issues are.

Our issues. Issues. If each of us have some issue. But I think it needs to be more heavily scrutinized by the commission and then come back and take another hard look at it. I don’t see anyone else on the board. So I will go to, well, Commissioner Carpenter, but I’ll go ahead and make my comments and go to you and then we’ll go ahead. And unless there’s someone else coming up, I will then recognize Commissioner Withington. I’m sorry. Of course. Good point. So what I’m getting up, what I’m picking up on as far as the. The sentiment of the commission is that it’s not so much a hard no as it is a quest for more information.

And there may well be. You know, I’m sure that there are explanations that we could. That we could get that would help us make this decision. So perhaps the best route is to go there, because the sense I give it also is that there was not the expectation on those presenting this that these questions would necessarily come up. So I don’t want to put anybody on the spot. I would like to give the gentleman here the opportunity to kind of think over some of the things that the commission has expressed as far as concerns, so that you could then address those concerns and perhaps then we can go forward.

I think that might be the most constructive way to go. I would also encourage commissioners to, if they have some thoughts, to go through the administrator and make sure that they are all filtered then into the relevant personnel who are putting this presentation together. I think that might be our best way. I’m going to go ahead and go to Commissioner Carpenter, and then Commissioner Johnson reminded me that we do need to let the public appear for a little bit. Commissioner Worthington, would you want to wait until after. Okay, so I’ll go ahead and recognize Commissioner Carpenter.

We’ll have any public who wants to speak, and then we’ll go to Commissioner Withington, assuming no one else wishes to be recognized. So with that, Commissioner Carpenter, thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to speak to the tabling idea since that was sort of where we left things. I just want to share that I am ready to vote yes on this this evening and also totally understand where y’ all are coming from, especially, like I said, Commissioner Johnson’s points on the. On the expenditure side of this and questions there. For me, what it comes down to is, like I said, we sometimes we don’t get very many bids on awfully expensive things.

And that concerns me a lot when that happens. I brought it up a number of times over the years. On this occasion, we got eight bids and we got a diverse and talented selection committee to examine those eight bids. And they selected out of the eight, which they thought was the best for me. That is good enough. Is it great? No. I suspect Commissioner Johnson is correct that we’re getting the government rate, but we are also the government, and I don’t know how to solve that problem today. So for me, I’m ready to vote yes on it.

With those concerns deeply shared. But also, you know, if a majority of y’ all want some additional time to study it, totally respect that as well. So those are my thoughts. Thank you. If anyone from the public would like to comment on this. Certainly, Please, please come up. One thing as we’re going down that road is I think we all, I think, are universal in our appreciation for the committee who put this together. This in no way reflects upon their hard work and their expertise. So it’s just, I believe the sense I get is we have questions, and that is really what we’re after.

Not assessing any ill feelings. With that, please proceed. Sheila Lillis, do you need my address? How does this work? Okay. I am the retired Parks and Recreation Director for the city of Gladstone, and previous to that, I worked for the city of Kansas City for six years. I am three blocks out of the western area now. I have moved to the eastern side of the world. And the things that you ask about connectivity, you ask about integrating with local municipalities, you ask about what makes it cost so much. All these things you ask. We also ask, what was a big concern to me was industry standards.

Because you guys up here are going to have to help us find the money. Most of trail work that does connections is done through grants through. I’m sure you’re very well aware of that. In the city of Gladstone, we have two, and they both were done through federal grants. Okay, so that’s the grant procedure. We ask about that. If you’re a County park department, 90% of your work is done in land mass. It’s not programs, it’s not services. It’s land mass and how you usually are land mass. John, you worked for me. You were one of my lifeguards.

How many years ago? Don’t tell them how many, because that’ll age both of us. But my point is, do we want to put in an aquatic center? Is that what we want to do as a county? I mean, those are the things that this is going to explore. It’s going to explore how we upgrade and put good amenities into places we already have existing places like marinas and golf courses. Courses. Those were my questions when I sat on the panel. I said, what do we want to ask? Do we want to ask if we have enough labor to take care of what we have? Do we want to ask about contract mowing? Those are the questions we talked about.

We talked about all the services, and we talked about us being a land mass department. We are not providing Gladstone theater in the park or other programs like that. But like Bud was asking all about the trails, the horse trails. You know, do we want better parks for people to be able to drive to and or ride their bikes, too and have picnic areas? I mean, those are the things we want to see. And we ask about all the land we have as a municipal, as a county. Can you look at that? What is viable for this? So they’re going to look at every piece of property we own as a county that could be park property.

So I really feel that we’ve done a very thorough job. And the one thing that I am most pleased about, because I’ve done these, I’ve sat on panels to pick consultants. I like their approach better than anyone I’ve ever had that I’ve got to look at. And granted, I’m not in your seat paying the bill, but I am a taxpayer and I do get the hammer grill and all that stuff. But we do not, and I repeat, we do not have the expertise to take this in house and try to solve the problems of this county’s park department without professional help and top professional help.

So I don’t envy the decision tonight, but believe me, we’re talking about east, we’re talking about west, we’re talking about contracts, we’re talking about labor, and we’re talking about what we can do to make this county have a better park system. And one of the big things I’m really worried about is letting people know about it. Letting people know. And that’s they’re going to talk about our marketing and our, you know, how we’re going to do our county, you know, the logo and how are we going to invite people? I just was at North Kansas City Hospital Day, they just changed our logo to North Kansas City Health.

What do we need to do? So those are the kind of things. So thank you for your time. And by the way, thank you. As a resident president of Gladstone, you’ve provided us with an awful lot of service. Those of us who live in Gladstone, it’s a wonderful city and certainly they’ll probably either have to carry me out feet first or possibly deport me. I don’t know which. Well, I’m always proud of the work I did in Gladstone and great people like John and I always said I depended on 15 to 17 year olds for my livelihood for 28 years, and I made it.

So. Thank you. Thank you very much. Commissioner Johnson, did you have a question of the. No Please go ahead. Oh, I’m sorry. Okay. Was there any other members of the public? I didn’t see anyone queuing up, but I do need to ask again. Okay, Commissioner Johnson, I’ll go ahead and recognize you then. John, I’ll ask you to go ahead and do a submission. Then Commissioner Withington will recognize you. If that sounds like the way to go, please, Commissioner Johnson. Yeah, I just want to let my opinion known here. First of all, I forgot to mention. So I’m Parks and Recreation.

That was my life. I grew up in the house of a Parks and Recreation director. My dad was a Parks and Recreation director in Long Beach, California. So that’s where I grew up with. So this is something that’s important to me as well. But my opinion at this point is I would prefer. Prefer to table it. I think that’s where you’re headed with it. So I won’t do that, but for a couple of reasons. Once it gives us an opportunity to look at things and examine things a little bit more closely. After this discussion that took place, I know Commissioner Lawson would like to look at some things a little bit more in depth.

But because it’s just because we’re not in a hurry, which is mentioned, it gives just a little bit more time to look at. Not a lot of time, maybe a week or two, I don’t care. But just a little bit more time to look at the details. And also, to be quite frank, the vendor had an opportunity to see behind the curtains tonight and kind of get a look at this before we vote. And if I were sitting in his shoes, I would certainly take a look at if there’s any opportunities to sharpen the pencil on this as well.

So when we come back next time, see if things might be different. But so with that in mind, I would. I would be in favor of table on this. Thank you very much. And thank you. Because I did want to extend Commissioner Withington the courtesy since he expressed the wish to make a tabling motion. Do you have anything to add, sir? I rest. Sir, you rest your case. If there is no one else, then I will recognize Commissioner Withington. Do I need to say I make a motion to table this until the first week in July or the second week, since we’re not going to meet the first week.

Let me go ahead and check with Councilor. Councilor. When he. I think I know the answer, but I want to make sure it’s done properly. The motion can be made to table. And then there’s not necessity. There’s not a necessity for a date certain to bring it back, or what would you prefer? And I guess I would suggest let’s let the incoming administrator have a chance to review it and decide when’s the right time to pull it off the table and bring it back to you. Makes sense to me. That was kind of what I was thinking.

I hated to put a date certain and impose a deadline on the incoming administrator until he had had a chance to kind of come to grips with where his comfort level is with that. So, commissioner, does that answer your question? Yeah, I just wanted to make sure I was going to do it right. So I make a motion that we table this until our incoming county administrator has a chance to review. Motion has been made to table. Excuse me. 20, 25, 187. Until such time as the incoming administrator has time to review and advise the commission.

Obviously no discussion. We will go right to a vote. Please call the roll. Commissioner Withington? Yes. Commissioner Lawson. Yes. Commissioner Wagner. Commissioner Johnson. Yes. Commissioner Thompson. Yes. Commissioner Carpenter? Yes. Motion passes. Six zero. That concludes that issue and that concludes our regular agenda. Next on our agenda are discussion items and there is one administrator. Would you give us a little bit of an introduction to that and then I will recognize our assessor? Absolutely. This evening we have county assessor Tracy Baldwin is here to provide information to the the commission about what the appraisal process looks like in the assessments office.

I feel your pain on the technology part of this thing. There we go. All right. All right. Good evening, commissioners. Thank you for inviting my office to give this presentation and I hope it’s very helpful. I’d like to say I was elected in 2020 by the citizens of Clay county to be the next assessor and my first term will end this coming September 2024. November of 24. Fortunately, I was re elected and ran unopposed to serve my second term, which will start this September. One of the responsibilities of the assessor’s office or any elected office is you take an oath.

And that oath says you follow all Missouri laws In the constitution of the state of Missouri. I do not just represent our county. I represent each and every taxpayer in this county. I’m very proud and I’m very honored to do this job of the assessor. And I do take it quite seriously. I’ve never met many people in the 16 years in the assessor office that do like to pay taxes, even myself. But we do live in a state that requires us funding for our cities, our schools, our police departments, our fire departments and many other things.

We also live in Clay county, which is one of the most attractive counties in the entire state of Missouri. I’m very proud to live in Clay county and I’ve lived here all my life. Clay county is also one of the fastest growing counties in the state and I would say say some of the main reasons of that is because of the schools, the cities, the police departments, the fire departments, our roads, and yes, property values. Meaning when somebody purchases a property in Clay county, they typically have a higher end return on their investment. In Clay county, one of the most important statutes required of the assessor is to value all real and personal property at a fair and equitable value.

Tonight we’ll learn many reasons why this is so important. But I would like to point out one Clay county is currently fifth in the state of Missouri with a total assessed value of approximately $6.6 billion. One reason that is very important is that’s how the state of Missouri ranks their counties based off classes of counties. I’ve never quite understood either why lawmakers try to make the assessment process change to a less fair and less equitable process which only redistributes the tax burden unfairly. Instead, in my mind, changing current laws or adding new laws to lower levies whenever increased evaluations occurs, in my mind that’d be the most effective way to ease the tax burden on the citizens when assessed valuations do occur.

Tonight in this presentation, in this presentation, we’re going to cover many different aspects of the assessment process. How we value homes, the statutes and laws that we follow, and then the consequences of not following those guidelines. And also how little the assessor has to do with taxes. Our main goal is to provide taxpayers an accurate, fair and equitable value. I’d also like to point out that most of the you notice that most of my staff’s here tonight to support the office. That’s a pretty direct reflection of how my office is ran with teamwork. We do have a passion for helping our citizens.

We take great pride in being as accurate and as helpful as possible. Without this amazing staff, none of this could be accomplished. I’d like to ask now that if we could hold our questions until the end, for sake of time, we do have a lot to discuss. I’d first like to play this short video. This is a very short, simple video of exactly what the assessor’s office job is and why. So there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the role of assessors and how they affect the property tax that homeowners pay. When someone hears the term Assessor.

They seem to think of a scary figure reaching for their wallet. Not so. Assessors don’t set tax rates. Assessors don’t chase tax dollars. An assessor is interested in carefully determining property values, and they take great pride in it. Property tax is determined by a simple formula. Assessors only affect one of these variables, the value. And they do so with incredible accuracy. Assessors aren’t tax collectors or even tax centers. They’re just fellow taxpayers. And their primary goal is to make everything fair and equitable. Imagine that you’re in a restaurant with two friends. One orders a hot dog, one orders a plate of caviar, and you order a steak.

The waiter comes to the table with a total bill of $100, but he doesn’t know how much each of you should pay. If everyone paid the same amount, the the guy who ordered the caviar might be happy. But what about the guy who ordered the hot dog? Enter assessors. The food is your property. Just like these meals, some people’s property is worth more than others. And it’s the assessor’s job to determine how much each property is worth. That’s it. So in the same way the value of these menu items would need to be determined. An assessor places value on properties to ensure pair to send equity.

After the assessor determines the value of each property, local governing bodies will set their budgets for the coming years. They set a tax rate in order to produce the dollars needed for their budgets. The value of a property does not affect the amount of property tax needed. The sum total of all those budgets is a set number that has to be divided up among all the property owners. So even if everyone’s value was cut in half by the assessor’s, the tax rate will be raised in order to generate the same amount of tax revenue. The assessors don’t determine the taxes you pay.

They just determine the values of properties to keep everything as fair and equitable as possible. When you notice a change in the property’s assessed value, that change is the result of a never ending quest for fairness and accuracy. Assessors are graded on their performance, so there is a detailed system to get accurate valuation. First, the assessor looks at similar properties that have sold their sale prices and the terms and conditions of each sale. That’s the reason your home won’t just be compared to the place next door. Studying things like square footage, age and location helps assessors determine how comparable another property is to yours.

Even seemingly small details like an extra bathroom or finished basement can result in significant Differences in value. Two otherwise identical homes. Assessors maintain a thorough database of real estate information to make this process as precise as possible. Changes in value are typically the result of local real estate market sales or major changes to a property. Remodel a kitchen or finish your basement, and your property’s value could increase. When you see your home’s assessed value, you can rest assured that the number has not been drawn out of a hat, nor shed, or with anything but equity and accuracy in mind.

Long story short, assessors are here to help, not trying to hinder. Their focus is accurate values, not tax collection. The only things an assessor chases are fairness and equity, and they take great pride in it. Great presentation. Presentation. That’s it for now. No, we got a lot more we’ll discuss a little bit deeper. First, I’d. For the next part of the presentation, I’d like to ask our attorney, Lucas Wallingford, to step up and talk a little bit about the legal processes that we deal with. And then after Lucas, we’ll have our chief appraiser of real estate kind of talk about how we, we do all this and value it.

So. So do any commissioners have any questions of the assessor at this moment? I think I’m kind of incorrect inclined to go through the three people, the assessor and the other two staff. But if anybody does have a question that they want, just please get my attention and we will go ahead and do that. Otherwise, we will wait until these three gentlemen have concluded and then open it up for questions here and then go from there. Yeah, the only reason I really ask for questions would be at the end because there’s going to be a little bit of each presentation with each presenter.

So there could be, we could be answering your questions before are after they’re asked. Thank you very much for that clarification. Hello, my name is Lucas Wallingford. I’m a licensed attorney that’s been with the assessor’s office for eight years. My main job is handling our complex commercial appeals, but I wear several hats. I’m going to give a little more context to the whole issue. Property taxes or ad valorem taxes, which is Latin for according to value, are in place in every state in the US and most developed countries. In fact, the only large country without a property tax is the People’s Republic of China, which does not even permit the private ownership of real estate.

As you can see from this map that’s on the screen, property taxes are highest in the Northeast New York, New Jersey area, with significantly higher tax bases in California, Texas, and the Chicago metropolitan area. Historically, property taxes have been around for thousands of years, from the days of ancient Egypt and Rome to colonial America. And today the United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, prohibits direct taxation unless apportioned between the states based on population. But this has resulted in the property tax being the main tax available for local governments to fund their operations, such as education, police, fire, roads, and most infrastructure improvements.

There are many reasons the property tax is so relied upon. It establishes a. Broad tax base that is based upon the ownership of all the property in a specific location. And it is ultimately borne by every everyone, because directly through a tax bill you might experience it, but also indirectly. Even if you do not own property, you have to pay rent. And real estate is a limited resource that everyone needs, so everyone comes in contact with it in some way. It has the fewest loopholes of any tax. There’s very limited exceptions and forms of relief. It is a reliably collectible tax because real estate cannot be concealed.

It provides an objective standard because it’s based on verifiable facts, market data, and actual measurements and observation, and by its nature automatically responds to changing economic conditions and is one of the fairest possible taxes. Most most economists agree that is somewhat progressive and is only said to be regressive when ratios of assessed values to sale prices are higher for lower value properties than for higher ones. It is unlike the sales or income tax because those are only estimated at the outset. Instead, the property taxes, like the video explained, calculated by taxing jurisdictions based on the specific amount of revenue that they require.

They then determine the tax rate by estimating that what rate multiplied against the total assessed valuation in their jurisdiction will produce that amount of money, and then it is collected every year, that amount of money. There are two primary forms of unfairness. Those are called horizontal equity and vertical equity. Horizontal equity is the variance of assessment ratios in between classes of property and areas, and that’s mostly addressed by using the same methods and data to value all properties. Vertical equity is different. It is the difference in assessment ratios between properties of inherently unequal values. And to illustrate why it’s important for the assessor to maintain assessed values.

I don’t know if you can see that with the current market. This example kind of illustrates how an improperly low value will shift the tax burden onto others, and that effect is magnified at higher valuations. And the inverse situation can certainly be true. If a property is overvalued, then that results in that taxpayer effectively paying the tax burden of others. In Missouri, every Version of the state constitution is provided for property to be taxed in proportion to its value in order to provide funding for the state, counties, municipalities, road districts, school district, libraries, hospitals and public health.

The annual tax liability consists of two parts, the assessment and the levy. The assessment is the process by which the assessor identifies property by parcel and owner, classifies it, values it and lists it so that taxing jurisdictions may apply their levies. The levy is the rate that is applied to produce that specific amount of tax revenue that’s due. The Missouri Constitution and those of most states contain a uniformity provision. And it requires that taxes must be applied uniformly across the same class of subjects within that jurisdiction that’s levying the tax. This requires that not only the same tax rates have to be applied, but that they are assessed by the same process because a failure to reassess one neighborhood, one type of property, that it violates the uniformity principles relative to others that are being continued to be revalued.

All property is presumed to be taxable under the Missouri Constitution. But the Constitution requires some property must be exempt. That’s the property of the government mainly, and it authorizes other types of exemptions. Those are primarily the property exclusively used for schools, religious worship and purposes purely charitable. The Constitution also authorizes some forms of tax relief, and you can see with these numbers here that approximately 16 to 17% of real property fall falls into this exempted or abated, which is the word we use for tax relief properties. What this means is that if those properties were not exempt, this is excluding government or abated, that roughly every single taxpayer’s bill would be about $200 lower.

The assessment procedure is contained in chapter 137, section 115, subsection 1 of the Revised Missouri Statutes. There is a two year assessment process where real property is revalued every two years as of January 1st in the odd year, and then those values carry over to the even year unless there is new construction. The assessor is required to make a list every year and to do so looks at every deed, plat and building permit in order to identify all property. When lacking sufficient information, the assessor is authorized to inspect the exterior of any property. And the assessment process in Missouri by statute requires that for value increases over 15%, they’re must have been an inspection.

All property is classified into one of three categories. Classes residential, commercial and agricultural. Agricultural property is valued at its productive use, which is set by the state tax commission and it’s a minimal value. But residential and commercial property are to be valued at their true value in money, which is the equivalent of fair market value, if you’re familiar with that concept. That is the price a willing buyer would buy property at from a willing seller, if not under any compulsion and ordinary terms of currency and essentially no duress. The taxpayers in our system, their due process rights guaranteed to them under United States and Missouri constitutions are respected through two central tenants, and that is notice and the opportunity to be heard.

So all increases in value are required to have an increased notice and those are mailed out. Whenever values are increased, primarily in the odd year, we send them out as of April 1 is generally when we try to do that. And in addition to the appeal rights guaranteed by the County Board of Equalization and the State Tax Commission, the assessor’s office in Clay county offers informal appointments where taxpayers can meet with staff to discuss their value and the information that we currently have listed about their property and provide any helpful information that we may not have access to.

While we do a very good job with the information we do have. Missouri is a non disclosure state. This means it’s only one of six in the country where recent sale prices are not required to be disclosed to assessment officials. Despite this being a pretty significant issue for for commercial property, the majority of single family residential home sale prices are disclosed within the real estate industry. But it still takes constant effort to maintain our database accurately and ensure every property is valued correctly. The State tax Commission, state agency that oversees assessment offices and requires our values to be within 90 to 110% of fair market value.

They conduct sales ratio studies which compare the current assessments to very recent sales prices for specific properties so they match those up. And when it is out of this ratio, it’s called being out of compliance. It triggers a separate process that could ultimately lead to a loss of funding. The very first step in that process is called the Memorandum of Understanding. Before we move on from this part of the legal section, I just wanted to talk a little bit more about this Memorandum of Understanding. On the screen is the actual Memorandum of Understanding that I’d signed for the in November of 2023 for the 25 and 26 assessment cycle.

And I’d like to talk a little bit how our office is funding as part of that the assessment office not funded by the county general fund. Our budget is made up part of the state tax commission funding, which is about $3.30 a parcel. That equates to about $350,000 for my office. The rest is funded by one half of 1% of the collections of the taxes. Again on the screen is the memorandum of understanding that Clay county has earned or I have seen signed for the 26 or 2526 maintenance plan agreement and with the understanding of following the terms and pursuant to the Missouri revised statutes and mainly due because our 23 and our 24 real estate sales study results were not within acceptable parameters.

Those parameters are again, the 90 to 110% of market value. If the MoU is not followed, we’d fall further for compliance and we would lose our funding. Which last week, the state tax commission at their meeting, 15 counties lost their funding from the state. Two of those are our neighboring counties. And I believe that there are about 81 counties in Missouri that signed an MOU. And definitely if we were not to follow our MOU, we would definitely lose our funding next year. We are on track with our MoU. We did follow the MoU, and we are back in or closer to in compliance.

And when I took office in Clay county in 2020, there was no carryover in our budget to speak of. And the commission at that time was paying approximately $350,000 in my budget. Today, the assessment fund pays 100% of its own bills. However, if we do not follow these guidelines from state tax commission, we address losing our funding. And $350,000 would quickly destroy our budget. And the county general fund would again have to supplement the shortage of of that fund, and that costs taxpayers money. The next part of the presentation, I’d like to have our chief appraiser, Joe Mezakaza, to kind of get to the meat and p as part of this and tell you how we do this and how we value homes.

Hello, my name is Joe Mezakaza. I’m the chief appraiser for Clay County. Been here for about 18 years now. Started out as a fee appraiser, licensed, certified in Missouri and Kansas. You know, did fee appraisal for several years before I came here for mortgages, banks, you know, private firms, stuff like that. Came to work here basically as a data collector or field appraiser for the county and did that for most of the years that I was here handling appeals and everything else. And about 2022 is when I was kind of promoted up to a supervisory role and ended up where I’m at now, basically.

I’m going to talk a little bit tonight about, you know, and try and try to answer some questions, I guess, in my presentation of basic questions that people have on how this is done. Most importantly, you know, we’re trying to get to fair market value as often as possible. There can absolutely be some inaccuracies in data and things like that. If you’re on properties that you can’t get on and things, you know, of that nature. But we do our best to get to those properties. So I want to start kind of with, you know, how does the assessor value my property? And we generally use three approaches to value for the office.

There’s the cost approach, which is where they record all your information. You know, square foot, lot size, your bill, all that stuff goes into it. External condition, quality of construction. Then there’s the market approach, which is generally your sales comparison approach that most people are familiar with from their mortgages. It’s the ones you’re going to see with, you know, the three comparable sales next to it. It. And here’s the value of your home, here’s all the adjustments. And then the third approach is usually the income approach. And the income approach is very seldom used for residential properties unless they’re like large apartments or even large complexes of like duplexes, fourplexes, things like that.

You can, you can use that approach, but for single family, generally, not for most your assessments. Cost approach is the number one form to value homes just like your insurance companies do. And the reason that is is it’s the only one that’s really capable of performing those duties on a massive scale. What we do is mass appraisal. That is different from fee appraisal. Fee appraisal is usually focusing on one house, all of its characteristics, what, what you know is great about it, what’s not so great about it, things like that, what’s the most comparable to it.

In mass appraisal, you don’t break it down to that kind of scale until someone appeals the property. So you’ll be looking at all those details when you do a physical inspection of the house, but you’re not really adjusting on an individual item basis until you get to, you know, much more of an appealed process where, where you’re breaking that down and you’re actually trying to compare that house to the three best sales in the neighborhood kind of a thing. And so we like to answer that one. You know, it’s not as cut and dried as people think.

You hear on the news, a lot of people are like, well, what are three comps did you use to value my house? In mass appraisal, you don’t use three comps to value a house. You use entire neighborhoods full of sales. And, and those market models and trends are what tell you what value range everything goes in after you’ve collected those physical characteristics. Another question we get a lot of is will all property values change due to reassessment? All values are likely to change, but not all will change to the same extent. Market values increase in some areas or some neighborhoods more than others just based on amenities, you know, what their proximity is to jobs.

Any kind of external obsolescence or things like that can affect market value differently in different areas. No improvements have been made to my property. Why should the assessed value increase? This is a big one that we get a lot usually this one is, I would say say 50% of appeals we get. This is one of the questions that comes up. And market value basically changes over time even if you don’t touch anything. And that’s just driven by what other people are paying for like properties in a certain snapshot or period of time. And that’s kind of what the real estate market is, is it’s just a snapshot of time.

You know, people will tell you it’s an up market or it’s a down market. It’s really just the, the market in its current conditions. And so those statutes require us basically to reassess property periodically so that we can maintain, you know, that proximity to, to true market value. The next one I got is how, how does reassessment affect my taxes or my tax bill? And that one depends. An increase in an assessed value does not necessarily mean your property taxes are going to increase. If levy rates increase, your taxes may increase even if assessed values remain unchanged or decrease.

We actually had a period of years back in 08, 9, 1011 where values went down several cycles in a row and almost everyone you talk to can’t ever tell you their taxpayers bill went down. You know, we, we try to do as best we can to follow that market trend as close as possible, but it, you know, it, you’re, you’re not controlling but one piece of, of the product, you know, the, the product at the end. Let’s see, where was I at here? So we’ve kind of talked about the difference between the mass appraisal and the, the fee appraisal, you know, being singular and on a massive scale.

I’m going to kind of skip over some of that for the sake of time tonight for this, for mass appraisal. Like our assessments start with the field staff. Like a lot of my field staff are in here and they, they, they’re the ones that are going to be out on these properties physically, you know, day in and day out. They’re the ones that have to knock on the doors, go in the yards, in the backyards, front yards, take pictures of the property. They’re going to record everything that they see at the property, whether it be the condition, quality, construction, if there’s anything new on the property that we didn’t have before.

Decks, patios, porches, all that stuff that we’re required to pick up. That’s when they record that data. And that goes into our system basically almost immediately. They have iPads, they work with that, just live right, input that stuff into the system. From this data, we basically develop a depreciated cost value of the home, just like many of your homeowners insurances do. When we compare, then we compare that cost value of a residence to actual market data from the neighborhoods. And that’s how we determine if the values that we have are in line with what the sales are in those neighborhoods.

Usually we’re going to look through those over the entire period of the assessment process. You start with an inspection of a property and you start on January 1st of the assessment year. Everybody knows that. And the assessment cycle runs two years. We don’t actually give a final opinion of those values until way towards the end of it. And that’s when we’re actually cleaning up all the records and going through and making our last sales ratio studies and adjustments based on what’s sold in that two year cycle. And that that tells us if we have outliers, we have properties that are falling way too high in an area or following way too low in an area.

And those are where we make, you know, a lot of the adjustments at that massive scale. You know, it, it’s important to note that not every neighborhood in the county county, we’ll have a physical inspection in any given cycle for every home. We’ll be in and out of most neighborhoods in a cycle because we have to pick up sales, newly constructed homes, building permits, all of those have to be physically inspected every, every year and every cycle. And so we pick those up and then add those in. And those are the most important ones to review are those sales, because those sales are what’s driving the values of everybody’s home.

And so when we pick those up after we’re done and we’ve adjusted everything else, then we begin to identify the neighborhoods where our ratios are off. So if we have neighborhoods where we’re coming in 30% below market value or what the sales are telling us, those are the areas that, that we’re gonna hit for Those neighborhood review inspections and try to make sure that we’re getting those neighborhoods up to par, where a neighborhood that might only be 10% below. We’re not gonna expend much of our resources there for the sake of time because we’re not that far off.

And so, you know, to maintain that ratio for the state tax commission and what we’re supposed to do, we’re gonna hit those hardest, you know, farthest off sales first or neighborhood neighborhoods. The timelines in assessment are a huge issue affecting the assessment process. And those can lead to inequalities in some neighborhoods, or at least, you know, the perceived inequalities that people have in neighborhoods. You can’t inspect every single neighborhood in an, in a county in a two year cycle. No, no assessment office in the state can do it. So when you go out and you do these, you’re going to be, like I said, in and out of almost every neighborhood in the county, doing building permits, doing sales reviews, doing your newly constructed homes, things like that.

You’re in those neighborhoods, you, you’ve been there, but you’re not physically doing every single house in that neighborhood. On an every year cycle. You’re going to hit the neighborhoods that your, your assessments, you know, ratios are off the most. Well, those timelines fall in there and they, they inhibit, you know, when we have to cut off data collection and things like that. And so what it does is it keeps homes, you know, that are inspected at a much closer to value rate than the ones that aren’t inspected. So you can have neighborhoods where, you know, a very small similar house might be in there five times over and they’d be different values on each one of them because two of them you’ve been to and looked at because they were just purchased where the other three you haven’t really been there.

You’re going to trend those sales, you know, when you get to doing the whole assessment, you’re going to trend that whole neighborhood, you know, up 12% or 20% or 18% or whatever percentage you’re below market to get all those homes in that, that value range that has to be completed whether you’ve physically inspected them or not. And so I want to move on kind of from that too. There’s talk all over the place about this 15% rule that we hear about and everybody kind of miscategorizes it as sort of a cap. The statute actually states that the assessment office can, you can’t increase property’s market value by more than 15% without performing a physical on site.

Inspection of the property and giving the homeowner the right to request an interior inspection if they want one. It doesn’t prohibit you from raising the property to get it to market. It just says that if you’re going to raise that house that much money or that much percent, you have to give them the opportunity, opportunity to come and look at it. You can’t just sit in an office and just blanket raise it. And that came about several years ago because a lot of properties in some areas of the state were under assessed for a long time and they blanket raised a whole bunch of properties, didn’t really look at them.

And there were a whole bunch of properties that had really bad condition issues that got raised way more than their market value was worth without anyone ever looking at them. And so the lawmakers actually set out with good intentions with this to try to create a situation where, look, if you’re going to do this, you really need to do your job and take a look at them. Most assessment offices try to abide by this, you know, now or going forward ever since, which can create other inequalities because. Because what happens is if you have to physically inspect every property that you’re below on, you’re going to get to even less of them on an assessment cycle basis.

A cap on assessments is basically the same thing. It’s going to put homes that are already at market or fairly assessed with a higher burden of the tax share. You know, the, the overall tax budget of these taxing entities doesn’t change. It just gets dispersed throughout the owners, regardless of who pays what portion. And so what happens is if you cap something like that, you’re going to have these houses that we assessed last year and went to that are taxed right where they should be, and all the ones we didn’t that are way up under, you’re never going to catch up because if the market has increased a certain percentage and outpaced us, you’ll, you’ll never get those people to pay their fair share while the rest of the neighbors that we actually got to will.

And that’ll just get further and further apart. Let me click on this thing here. This is a chart and I’m going to kind of show you a couple charts here just to show you how Clay county has performed over the years. The following chart basically is a historic sale price trend for Clay county reported straight out of the MLS system, which is multiple listing service. This data is basically an overview of the market trend for a period of 20 years. This first chart will show the trend of the medium home sale price in Clay county from 2005 to 2015.

As you can see here, the median home price or value in 2005 was $158,000. This dipped down a little bit as you can see like in 201011 when the economy and the market had crashed all the way down to like $130,000 before recovering a little bit. And by 2015 the median home sale price was about 170 $60,000 at the beginning of 2015. So over a 10 year period, Clay County’s medium home sale price only increased $2,000 in that 10 year span. This next one is going to show you the last 10 years and this, this graph is basically showing you the drastic, drastic increase in value or sale prices.

Median home prices in the last 10 years. As you can see here at the end of 2015, the median price was about 163,000. At the end of 2015, steadily increased until about 2019 and then rapidly increased until 2023 before starting to restabilize again in the last couple in the last year or so. The current medium home sale price in Clay county at the end of this 10 year chart is $335,000. So we started at $163,000 and in 10 years we’re now at 335,000 for a median sale price. The previous 10 years we had a $2,000 increase in that number.

In 10 years. This, this 10 years we had $172,000 increase in median home price. That’s 105% increase the median value. The primary reason assessment increases have been higher in the last several years is basically this data right here. The assessment offices are basically trying to keep pace with that real estate market and stay in compliance with those STC guidelines in your, you know, state statutes. And so the last chart that I kind of have up here is going to show some of the. We spoke about the MOU earlier and this, this chart is going to show you basically our sales ratio study for about, since basically 2010 until 2023.

The 2025 hasn’t been conducted yet because we haven’t finalized all these values and appeals and everything for this year in order to do a sales study that’ll be done later on. This chart’s going to show you that the ratio was basically in the range of compliance for most years until real estate values began increasing drastically in 2018, at which time we fell further behind each year as that the actual increase in real estate market outpaced our increases in assessment. This last assessment cycle, Even after significant increases to market values across Clay county, we were still too low on average and were forced to sign this MOU with the stc as mentioned earlier.

And you can see in the. In the chart, the red line up there with the percentages, that’s where our ratio study was. We were at 97, 97%, 95% of market, 93%, 87, 87, 90. And then finally last, this last year in 23, we were all the way down to 79% because, you know, the real estate market itself outpaced us faster than we could even get out and catch it. And the further, if you’ll notice in this graph, this is a good thing to highlight that loss or that 15% rule that everybody talks about didn’t come into play until after 2017.

And you can plain as day see on this chart what effect that’s had on our assessments and how our ratio has become further and further off because you just don’t have the staff to physically inspect those properties that in the past were always trended just based on market models. And that probably is just going to further come continue as long as the market increases. We are seeing the stabilization of that market in that previous chart that we had up here. You’ll notice in the last couple years, it starts to level off. If that continues, we will still be chasing market value for at least another cycle.

But eventually we’ll get into the range where we don’t have to chase it anymore. We’ll, we’ll, you know, it’ll catch us, so to speak. Speak at this time. I just wanted to kind of speak a little bit about the appeal process that we do. Clay county has always done the informal hearing processes. We get our letters out in this county usually at 1 April, instead of waiting till the mid June when most of the other counties do. And we do about a month and a half to two months of informal hearings where each one of my staff basically sits down and has conversations with homeowners, you know, all day long, every day for roughly two months, which is more time that they’re not in the field picking up homes because they’re doing these.

But these appeals are invaluable to us because they will actually point out where we have problem neighborhoods if we haven’t caught it. And we get a lot of people appealing from one neighborhood or another. That usually is a red flag to us that we need to protect. Probably go over there and look at that. So we do a lot of those this year for 2025, our informal hearings, we sent out 90,000 change of value notices in the county. This year we had 1,059 properties appeal to the informal process. 587 of those properties received no adjustment. They were basically at or still below market value.

472 of them did receive an adjustment. And most of these are based on things like condition issues, you know, physical inspections of the home that we had done when they requested it and found out they had lots of problems inside, you can’t see from the outside. And so those, those, those, those appeals save, you know, the resources for our board of equalization like a ton. I mean that would be a lot of people appealing to the board every year that we, we kind of bypass. But it also gives us a lot of that data. So with that, I’ll just kind of end my portion of it and kind of open it up to questions or to Tracy, I guess.

Next. Get my stuff? Yeah, go ahead. I just. Did you hear anything? I got one, one follow up. I was wanting to follow up with Joe’s on his comment. I’d. Another kind of fun fact that I was thinking of talking about the 15%. Clay county has about 81,000 and a few residential single family home parcels. Of the 81,000 parcels we had approximately 13,000 that went up over the 15%. But then you have to take out the new construction or improvement process. So of the properties that went up over the 15% G due to new construction or an addition, about 6,000 of those, if you take that out, that leaves Clay county with about 7,000 properties that went up over 15%.

I thought that was a pretty amazing number. This does really conclude our presentation and I hope it’s been informative, helps the commission and the citizens. I’d also like to say that most all of the citizens information and even more is on our website with videos, FAQs and a lot of other things that’ll. That’ll explain a lot of this. I’d also like to thank the commission for allowing, again, allowing my staff to give this presentation and kind of showcase our office. And before we get too far in, I would also like to ask our auditor, Victor Hilbert to step up and give a little snapshot of the taxes collected and how that works.

Well, before we do that, two things. First off, go ahead and tell us what the URL where citizens can find this information. You said it was on your website, but claycountymo.gov and it’s under the assessor’s department and then there’ll be personal property, parts of the page, and real estate. And there’s links to click in. And on each side, there’s lots of different information. And our phone number really easily is 816-407-3510. And I want to go to Commissioner Lawson. She’s been very patient. So, Commissioner, if you want to go ahead and then we will, you know, we’ll go back to the auditor.

But, Commissioner, the only question I had is when they were talking about looking at neighborhoods, that’s perfect, you know, because if you look at some of these neighborhoods, the houses are all very, very, very. So as far as size is concerned and number of bedrooms, all that kind of thing. But what about, like, out in the country? And like, for me, I sit on just 15 acres. Well, the people around me, three of the houses near me have about the same or less acres. And they have. One has sold recently for almost a million. Another went for like 77,000.

And the one next door is listed at over 600. Almost. No, I think it’s 800,000. So here’s my little shack sitting there. How do you then in a situation like that, what do you do to do the evaluation? Well, land is an allocation of value. So it’s in rural areas. And it depends whether it’s ag or it’s just all residential. So residential is more of an allocated value. So if lot’s in a residential area, they’re all going to be pretty similar based on their size, just based off the allocation. Now, if you’re talking about rural properties with agriculture values, it’s a soil grade or based off productive use with a combination of soil grade.

So those can quite differ. I mean, if you have a house that’s listed for $700,000 and they have 100 acres with it, if you look on our website, it’s going to be very low value because of the ag value, but they will be asking quite a bit more. So I hope that’s kind of where you were looking at. But the ag values gets a huge discount based off state of Missouri statutes as a productive use or soil grade. So if at an ag value, a typical land is probably close to $20,000 an acre in Clay County.

But if the valuation of that, we look at a soil grade and a productive use, and typically about an acre of. I’m looking at my soil grade, lady, is probably about a typical. About $8,000 an acre for an ag value or, oh, I’m way off $500 per acre. So that’s that’s the discount on the ag law of Missouri ag value. And you know, we’ve had people ask, you know, my neighbor is only valued at this, but they have five times the acreage that I have. Well, that’s one of your biggest reasons, because how ag values are valued.

Okay. Commissioner Wagner, I believe you had a question. Well, just. Just a couple real quick statements. First of all, thank you for all of the detail. You always bring it and I always appreciate it. But I do want to recognize everyone from your team who is here tonight. Those who spoke and those who did not. Clearly they help you a lot because they just fed you some information that you didn’t know about soil. And so I appreciate her being there. Speaking of feeding, my one complaint for you is in your video. You mentioned steak, caviar and hot dogs.

And then you, then you introduce your chief appraiser as meat and potatoes. And so I don’t know if you’re thinking about dinner, but you sure made me think about it. Next time, the appraisers office for sure. Or else you tell me that you’re doing that so I can have a bigger lunch. But at any rate, all joking aside, appreciate what everybody does. You’re out there in the field, you’re out there behind partitions. We don’t get to see you very often. Appreciate what you do and appreciate you standing here with your assessor this evening. And thank you very much.

Thank you. Before I go to Commissioner within, he’s next on the queue, could we just have everyone from your office stand up because I think we need to recognize and appreciate the work they do. Commissioner Withington. Hey, thanks, Tracy, for coming. I hope you’re paying your staff overtime or giving them some comp time or something for being here. Hey, I know when you and I talked back in April, you know, we talked about why I requested this and you know, I’m glad that you did this. It wasn’t for this commission. It was for the. It’s for the taxpayers.

You know, probably the most asked question I get besides are the Royals coming to Clay county or how is my assessment done? So I think you guys did a good job assess, you know, going over this process. I mean, you guys answered a lot of my questions. I had questions about the 15% and everything. But one. One question I do have is could you explain why we. Again, just so the people at home know the 79% MoU ratio and because I think a lot of them feel like this is. We’re just trying, you know, we’re they’re being unjustly punished or whatever.

And just so they know that, you know, we’re trying to get back into, into the correct ratio. Sure. Then that’s probably a great catch there because the 79% I didn’t expect that means that we’re low on our values. We’re supposed to be at the 90% range. And if you look historically, I mean, in the 2010, 2011, we were at 97% and it just fell off. And you know, that is one of the biggest worries and concerns of my office is to lose its funding. You know, I, even if we lose our funding, you know, it’s up to the commission that’s going to have to supplement that funding and that’s by state law.

So if I, if I lose my funding and I can’t afford my assessment budget, that’s. You have to step in and afford that. So as my duty as an assessor, that’s one of my most proudest achievements of being able to pay our own bills and keeping our funding and not having to to use that general fund. And you know, I truly hope I never have to see using that general fund again. But, you know, that is one of the biggest concerns if we were to lose our funding is the general fund would have to start supplementing that again.

And not only, you know, we’re not only talking about the $350,000 in funds that you’re losing, you’re talking about the legal fees, the legal issues, the black cloud over your county for the, you know, we do have a neighboring county that’s in the same similar situation. And we should thank every one of us in here tonight that we’re not in that situation. So it’s just a big concern that funding’s a huge thing. Yeah. And I get that. And also just to look forward a little bit, I know state House Speaker John Patterson has said he wants property tax capping looked at it, whatever for the upcoming veto session.

And I know that you guys had spoke about that and I know when you and I talked back in April, I said, hey, you know, the state Tax commission’s allowed Jackson county to cap theirs at 15%. So we’re. What problems do you foresee that happen if that is the. I know they’ve also just in this executive or this special session allowed, what, 22 counties or something like that to do a freeze and a more to do a cap or whatever. So if they do make a change in the exec in the veto session, how do you see that impacting Clay County.

I am for against any type of freeze for your property tax, your property values. Your what? I’m against any type of a cap for property values because I express that. I mean, all a cap does is get you further from being equitable. It’s unfair. It redistributes the taxpayers unfairly. So if Commissioner Wagner is at his full market value, but Joanne isn’t, everybody else that is at their value are going to be picking up that slack because it’s redistributed. So when you cap properties, you’re essentially doing that. And for the life of me, I don’t understand why a county, especially with the $6.6 billion in assessed value of why you would want to just throw a random number up there and come up with an assessed value that’s not even close to accurate to anything.

Again, the most effective way to save your taxpayers money on their taxes is limit the levies. We have a hancock of amendment currently in Missouri. The most effective way for that to be done is through a legislation at the state level. Expand your hancock, change your hancock to limit taxing in these to further rolling them levies back. And in part of this presentation, Victor’s going to show you some of that in his slides of what that does if you were to cap properties. But you know, I’m still going to go go back to it. You know, maybe it’s because I’ve been in the assessor’s office for so long.

It’s just for the life of me, I can’t understand why they consistently. Now I have my opinions of why they consistently try to change the process instead of changing the levy process, because that’s not a popular way to go. But that is the most effective and easiest way to ease your tax burden on your citizens is lowering your levies. I mean, the biggest one, you know, the county has a levy right now. Zero it out. That’s going to save your taxpayers money. Now, a lot of times, unfortunately, you won’t be able to afford that. But your schools, your fire departments, police departments, if they all had to roll those levies back further, that would save your taxpayers and that would be the most effective, fair and equitable way to do it.

Yeah, I agree. We, we need to look at rolling back those levies more. Since I’ve been on this commission, I have every year suggested that we voluntarily roll back ours. More than what? Yeah, Hancock. And just so you all know, I’m gonna make that motion again this year and that that is one of the things I if the county was to do that, you know, I would even be willing to, you know, you could have discussions with your tax ex, your cities, your schools, the others to say, hey, what can we do? It’s on our shoulders.

How can we help our taxpayers? And, you know, I had a discussion earlier today with a gentleman that was an investor in commercial properties, But I told him the story. You know, we’ve been doing. We do appeals for people. And it’s always hard when you have a person come in, typically an elderly person that lives in $100,000 or less home, their foundation is filling up with water, their roof leaks, their windows are rotted, and they’re sitting there in front of you telling you, I’m going to lose my house, I won’t have a place to live if the taxes go up.

You know that that’s extremely hard. And to tell them, you know, sorry, there’s nothing we can do because we have to follow this law and stay in there. Instead of your taxing entities just easing back, they get more money every two years. And if that Hancock was more applicable or the entities were more in tune to doing that, that’s your most effective way of saving taxpayers money. Did you have something to say? Before I go to the next question, I just want to point out, too, on this chart where it says that we’re at 79% of value, that has a drastic effect on that Hancock amendment, because the farther we are away from that true market value, the less and less they have to roll back anything under that amendment.

And that that’s another big reason why you want to stay as close to market as possible and compliant, because you’ll never see those levies roll back. And that, that, you know, that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do here. Thank you, Commissioner Wagner. Thank you. I just want to let the assessor know that I practice what he preaches. I had this conversation last night, not in this county, but a county south of here that will not be named. And the question or the complaint that rose was about their assessed value, in some cases commercial, in some cases going up 600%, in one case, 1,200%.

And they wanted to know what to do. And so they. People think I know something about government. So they asked me, and I told them exactly what you said, that if you really want equity that you have to talk to those who have the levies and suggested to them, you can talk to that county, but you need to talk to the city, in this case Kansas City, you need to talk to the school district because in the end, especially with the school district, they have the highest levy of all, at least as far as dollar value is concerned.

So just want you to know your suggestion does not fall on deaf ears. And I’m practicing what you’re preaching and I would suggest that to everyone that they have those conversations if they have those complaints. So good job. Thank you. But I still want to know when you’re going to bring dinner next time. Commissioner Carpenter, thank you. So sincere thanks to all of you for. I found that super helpful and I’m sure the public did as well. So thank you. And to the county to the south, my understanding of the main driver of the problems down there is exactly what you lay out on this chart, which is that over the course of decades they got farther and farther and farther and farther off, specifically in the direction of being under in most locations, such that when they finally got around to deciding to fix the issue, the increases that were required to fix the issue had to be extremely dramatic.

And that of course led to significant problems. And now it’s a years long debacle. So I agree with you, Assessor, that let’s, you know, let’s avoid that situation and you know, try to try to stay in the, in the 90 to 110 zone. Is that the, do I have that right? Yeah. Yep. 90 to 110. To follow up real quick with that. You know, just not only that problem, why I’m pointing this out is, you know, Joe had mentioned that we send our change of values notices out in April. We don’t have to do that until June by statute.

And that was one of the steps that was missed in another county. Those got sent out a little later. We try to do that. I mean, that’s another courtesy of my office. The informal process is not required by the state. That is one that is a courtesy of my office. And it, it’s a huge one. We’re, we’re going to keep that, but that is, you know, part of it. We try to send those out as soon as we can get those values out. For one, it helps us with infection formals to get more people in and give them the chance to appeal.

But it also helps the other offices to get their numbers. We’re on a crunch time every single year. You can ask our clerk with the numbers, with utilities and you know, we just did our certification. Then she has to run her reports after the BOE and give a final certification. But it’s all on a timeline. It all has to work together. But we At Clay county, at least since I’ve been in office in 2020, we try to move those up as fast as possible. Even with the. The statute of the BoE and our charter government, which pushed our timelines back even further.

The charter government document basically says at a certain date, well, we move that up. But the document says it’s not a do until then. We do move it up a few months, just in order. And that is another reason it’s not just for our own offices. That’s for the taxing entities. Because all the schools, the fire departments, police departments are calling Stacy pretty much every day, I would imagine. You know, where’s the values? When are we going to get these so we can start setting our budgets? But there is a process. And one reason that I hold a hat on every office in Clay county is we try to be proactive, get things out faster and sooner to give our citizens more time to use their resources of appeals and things like that.

Well, I appreciate you doing that. And in part because, look, people are frustrated that their taxes have gone up so dramatically. You know, you’ve laid out the reason, the market reason. Why? Because property values have gone up dramatically over the last decade. You know, I think there’s general awareness that that’s the case, but I think it was helpful to do the comparison to the previous decade and show just how aberrant the last decade has been in terms of home value presence. We’ve never seen nothing like this. No, exactly. There’s no county there anywhere that’s seen something like that.

Because it was such an aberration, it created a tax burden that has, you know, hurt a lot of people for sure. I also want to underline what you said before about where the solution actually does lie. It is with the levies and the tax and jurisdiction. Now, I personally wouldn’t support expanding Hancock to force those changes, but there are democratic ways to achieve this as well, which is that we vote on our levies regularly with the school districts and others. Now, the school districts are the biggest driver of your property tax bill by far. And, and you know, we get to vote on those things as voters and residents here in the county and as residents of the school district.

The school district I went to is North Kansas City schools. It’s the biggest in the county. In fact, it’s the second biggest school district in the state. It’s the state, yeah. And is on a growth trajectory to become the biggest school district in the state. And, you know, regularly 80 plus percent of the voters vote to affirm the levy request of the school district. And if folks really want there to be a meaningful change in the amount of money that they have to pay, that is where the fight is. I agree with you. If you want to pay less money, then you’ve got to change the outcome of those democratic elections that’s producing those outcomes over and over again.

And occasionally that happens. I recall our councilors from the city of Liberty. I recall one, maybe 15ish years ago. I don’t know if that is about right. But you know, it got voted down because folks were unhappy with the proposed increase. So it can happen. I’m simply saying that there is a democratic process to control these things. Yeah. And I don’t want to give the reflection like I’m against the schools or anything like that because, you know, that is honestly one of the reasons that Clay county is the fastest growing. I mean, it is our schools.

We have great schools, we have great roads. We have, you know, a lot of great things. And that is part of it. And you know, unfortunately, again, as I say, you know, Missouri requires that funding for those entities, and that is one of the reasons we are a great county. Well, I agree. And I just, again, thanks to. Thanks to each of you, especially those of you who spoke this evening, thought that was really helpful. So thank you, Commissioner Johnson. Thank you. Thank you, Tracy, for being on your staff, for being here. I really appreciate it.

I am one that just my personal view is I hate property taxes. I mean, I hate tax in general. Doesn’t everybody. I don’t know if anybody in here love them. Does anybody love. But the system, how property taxes work, I don’t like for a number of reasons. And matter of fact, I’ll go back to the analogy that was in your video of the hot dogs and the steak and the caviar. That would suggest that some of our taxpayers are getting caviar and some of our taxpayers are getting hot dogs. They’re not. We’re all getting the exact same thing from the county.

We all drive on the same roads. We all get the same service from our police department, our sheriff’s department. We all get the same exact service. Not one is getting more than the other, but yet some pay a lot more than others. That’s where I think there’s some inconsistencies. And that’s just another philosophical thing. I’m more for consumption tax, where you buy more, you pay more, that’s fine with me. But this idea that you have to pay more just because your property is worth more, even though you get the same services, in my opinion, I don’t think is fair, number one.

And number two, you get in a situation where you have people where they might say they inherit a big house, an expensive house, they don’t necessarily have a whole lot of income, but they inherit a big house, they don’t have the income to pay for just a tax on the house. And when they go up year after year, and then the government has the authority to take that house from them, to take that property from them, I just don’t like that. I think that’s just bad, bad business. I don’t think that’s good governments. But nonetheless, that’s not your problem.

That’s just my. I mean, it’s not your fault. It’s just my opinion on this and to Commissioner Carpenter’s thoughts or opinion on school districts are really the ones that are, that are really. Almost 90% of a tax bill is your school districts. We have, as I mentioned, I think every year we’ve been here, we’ve actually lowered the levy for the county. The county’s levy is next to nothing. I don’t think anybody has a big problem paying what. What we require. It’s the schools, and we don’t control that, unfortunately. But it’s a big number. And when you talk about caps on assessed valuations, assessed values, I believe in caps.

Not on the assessment, but the caps on the increase in one year, in any given year. You know my history. You and I have talked. I come from California. We can’t raise it more than 2% here. The million dollar house. What’s that? The million dollar house. But let me ask you this, a couple questions. This 90% thing, can you. Oh, there it is. Let me turn mine on. This where they want to get 9, 92, 90 to 110%. Yep. First of all, why in the world would you ever go to. Excuse me, 110% on someone. Why? Yeah, that’s just the range that they.

The state tax commission is set, so the state. The state is expecting. But that’s. Again, you’re talking about equitable equitability. Why would you want your house to be valued at 100,000 when it’s worth a million? It doesn’t seem equitable to me, but, you know, I’m. No, but why would I want it valued at $110,000? 110%. That’s the state guideline. And if you can look at our ratios over the years, we’ve never been over 100%. Well, this shows from 2010 on okay. And when we look at this, and this kind of goes along to the number you showed of the increases over the last 10 years, the last 10 years, I think you said 105% increase.

So on average that’s 10% a year. We can step with that with not even going anywhere near 15% on increases. Why, why hasn’t that been done? You’re, you’re talking about 105% over a 10 year cycle. But not like some, some like. So real estate is assessed every two years. Right. They’re two year snapshots. Right. Some years you might only had a 3% increase. Right. In, in the actual market. Not, not our assessment but the actual market value where other years in there they had a 28% increase in a two year cycle. So when you have any kind of a cap or these rules that we have in place now with the 15% rule that we talk about, you can’t catch 28% in a two year cycle for everyone in your county.

You can’t physically inspect enough properties to even keep pace with the market. So it’s very important that you, if you put any kind of cap on that, it needs to be on the other side of it because or you’re never going to have an equitable valuation distribution. What you’re doing by capping is only capping one person from not paying their fair share while giving it to the rest of them. You’re not affecting the final bill at all. If you. Like I said, he’s talked about lowering levy rates. Another simple thing that the tax lawmakers could do at the state is just lower the tax rate on residential property.

Instead of being 19%, make it 17% assessed. You just blanket cover everyone right there. They won’t do it because they don’t want to fight the taxing industry in court and everything else. So let me ask you this, this, this 90 to 110. Now the state by. You and I had a conversation. Trace, I know you don’t, you don’t assess your own property. The state does. Right. Who else does the state assess in our county? Nobody. They do state assess airplanes, utility companies. And are there assessments at the 90 to 100%? Yes. Well, it’s a little different on airplanes.

It’s personal property, so it’s based off of book value, whatever that book value is for that airplane. So it’s actually 100% of market value. And they’ve assessed your. I don’t want to get too personal, but it’s all public knowledge. They’ve assessed your home and your home, they’ve assessed it the 90 to 110% of the value. Yes, mine actually in the 21 and or 22 and 23 cycle, went up about 16%. This year it went up about close to that, to another 16%. 16%. So let me ask you about. When someone gets a property tax bill. You guys can hear me? Okay.

When someone gets their property tax bill that says assessed value total, AP avr and it says taxable value total, TVR usually the same, I think, but assessed value total. So that’s taken the assessed valuation of the house, what you think the value of the house is the property and multiple by that 19% if it’s a resident. So that’s where that number comes from. Then what’s the difference between AVR and tvr? Do you know? I you’d have to ask the collector on that. I’m not sure what the tax bill says on there. Okay. Okay. So 19%. Okay.

So just for. That’s okay. BARBARA I don’t I’m good enough with that. Unless you want to share it. That’s just something you want to say. Barbara O’Reilly, Collector it’s your value on your home or your real estate, your agriculture. What does it say? So what what’s AVR and what’s tvr? I mean, AVR is assessed value total and TVR is taxable value total. Do you have your bill? I’m looking them online. I’m looking at, okay, can I let me look at. Right here, property values, that’s your assessed and then that’s the taxable. What’s the difference between the two? Could you guys go ahead and have that with a microphone so the entire room can hear? I mean, in this one we’re looking at it’s the same.

The number is the same, the values are the same. But would they ever be be different and if so, what would cause them to be different? I don’t know. What might cause them might be agriculture might be different added. BARBARA could that be like if there was a partial abatement or something that the only parcel or like a. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Could you go ahead and kind of re restate that with the microphone so that it gets on the record, please? Thank you. Each property has its own taxing breakout, so I would have to look at what it was for sure to give you a real.

I don’t think that the assessment would be any different. It might be something added. It might be. There’s just so many different things that are in there. It Would. I’d have to look at each partial to look. See what it would be and then. Not for you, Barbara. Thank you. Let’s see where my notes here. Okay, so then for an assessment, for an increase of over 15%, it requires an inspection. Right. And my understanding Is you had 13,857 properties that were assessed at over 15% increase this last year. So all those were inspected. Yes, all of those were going to get.

It would have gotten a physical inspection. Like over half, like about half of those were new construction homes or building permits anyways. Yeah, 6131 were new construction inspected also. And then the other 7 thousands are just neighborhoods that we keyed out as being farther off on their ratios. And so we had to go into those areas and do basically physical walkthroughs of reassessments. So what’s in this, What’s a, an inspection look like? When you go out and inspect a home, what do you do? Typical home, if it’s not a gated property? Right. You’re gonna walk out there.

My guys generally are just gonna walk around the house anymore because everybody has cameras and rig ring doorbells and everything else. We will generally try to knock on the door real quick, but we’re going to take a front picture, they’re going to walk around the exterior of the house, try to take a rear picture. Some people will request that we don’t take it. Any of those rear pictures that we put in the system are in the system, only they’re not posted online. But we put those in there so that we have proof that, yes, we did more than a drive by from the street in the inspection of this property.

And what are you looking for when you do an inspection? Conditions, quality, construction, anything that’s on the record that, you know, people all the time will put like, you know, new decks on or an outbuilding out there. They don’t pull a permit because they’re in the country. We’re gonna have to pick that up when we see it. You know, sometimes neighbors will actually call us and rat out their other neighbors and say, hey, he’s got a building over there. We have to go pick those up. And when you do an inspection and you, based on that inspection, you, your evaluation is done.

And can the property owner go into the system or somehow see what you use to evaluate the property, to assess it, to whatever you assessed it, send you that letter, that notice of a potential increase that basically is not an actual increase until all your values are certified. So we send you that Notice and we say, hey, this is what we’re assessing you on at based off the information that we looked at and the physical inspection that we have. If you don’t feel like that’s right, contact us at any time during that period and we can do an interior inspection if you want us to.

You don’t have to. We will come out and do another exterior inspection with you if there’s something you want to point out. And then generally we do those informal hearings kind of at the same time with a lot of those people. To your question, doje. Any citizen can go on our parcel search at any time, pull up their property. Now, it’s single family homes. Commercial property is a little different. But if you wanted to go look at your home, you could actually pull it up on parcel search and it’ll give you details. Bedroom, bathroom, count, things like that.

The sketch will be on there, any kind of decks or anything that are attached to, to it. So you can look at that. And we do have a lot of people that go on there and say, hey, hey, Joe, I don’t have a fireplace in my house. And you know, we’ll take a look at it and take it off or something like that. But yes, you can go on there. It’s a little hard to decipher for some people of what it is. Our basement finish isn’t currently listed on the parcel search. We’re still working on trying to get that to populate.

But you can go on, on there and look at our information. And we have lots of people every year call us and say, hey, I was looking on partial search, I noticed this. This isn’t quite correct. And you know, so I understand that. I’ve seen all that, I’ve done all that. But the question is, okay, so somebody goes and looks on a. Does exactly that. But it shows the same thing it showed last year and it shows the same thing it showed the year before. But this year I’m getting an increase of, you know, 15, 20, 30%.

But it doesn’t say why it all of a sudden jumped that much. I know the value of my home didn’t go up 30, 30%. So why would it jump 30%? Is there anything in there that you guys put in to say, hey, this is why we’re increasing this so high this year. Normally if it’s, if it’s, if there’s nothing changed physically on the house, it’s going to be just in the market itself. It could also be there was an error in the system. So sometimes, you know, you have people that are typing in lots and lots of data over the period of a two year cycle.

If you fat finger one number in there on square foot or something, you could throw something off. 50, $60,000. A basement finish. Yeah. If I can interrupt real quick, it’s got to be more than a market adjustment because no market adjustments are going up 30%. But if you’re, if you’re, if your home was valued, let’s say your home was valued at $500,000. But when we look at the market, it’s not about what the market increased in the last two years, it’s about what liked properties are selling for right now. Right, Right. So the market might tell us, last year that type of home sold for 800,000 and this year it sold for nine.

But if you were valued at five, you got to get to nine. You don’t got to get 100,000 up, you got to get 400,000 up to be at market. But so what you’re saying is you’re going to get a much higher adjustment if you’re that far undervalued because it hadn’t been adjusted. Right. That’s the problem. So the issue is some of these homes were not adjusted throughout the years. 10, 15, 20 years. This is what my example of a cap would do is you would hold a house like that way behind everyone else. Yep. Well, but that’s, they’re gonna pay that person’s.

And that’s exactly right. So this is, this is my argument against that. It’s not the taxpayer’s fault that we, and I’m saying we, government, government didn’t get our assessments done. It’s not okay, it’s not their fault. But yet they’re the ones that are suffering because they don’t pay attention. These bills, they get their bills every and all of a sudden they’re gonna get bill. One year that went up. It went up a thousand dollars this year. Okay. Why am I paying a thousand dollars more this year? Nothing’s changed. My house has been exactly the same forever.

No, I’ve had no addition anything. But now it’s a thousand dollars more this year than it was last year. No, but you didn’t call us when you were undervalued. So, so you weren’t paying your fair share. But nobody knows that. But we’re catching it up. Nobody knows they’re undervalued once you show them that. And you know, people know they’re undervalued. I mean, plain and simple, when somebody buys a home for A million dollars and the assessor has it on for 500. You know you’re undervalued. No, no, no, no. So I’m talking about. No, so I’m talking about when assessor hasn’t, when it hasn’t been.

Someone’s been in the house for 20 years, it’s not a matter of what they paid for. They’ve been in this house for 20 years and they’d be getting their bills every year. Then all of a sudden, one year the bill goes way up. Because the last 20 years or however many years, I’m just making up numbers. The government, I’m going to say the government because we’re all the government. That’s all people think is we’re the government. The government didn’t assess it and now they’re going to assess it for this big increase. Nobody’s paying attention to the market, what their house does every year and what the prices.

But where are you forgetting the step? They weren’t paying their fair share originally. Okay, that’s what you understand, I get that. No, I think we just disagree on the subject because they were undervalued and not paying their fair share. So everybody that was valued was paying that slack. And once they’ve cotton up and that’s what the market value and what a successor is supposed to do. We’re not supposed to be undervalued. But unfortunately, again, with the resources that we have, there are times that people are undervalued. But I understand it. But here’s what happened. People learn to live on the income they have and the expenses that they have.

So you’ve been living for 10, 15 years on. Okay, this is, this is my income. You’re using a wide term. I don’t believe anybody’s ever been assessed under assessed for 10 or 15 or 20 years. It generally never happens. We again, we usually will pick up those terms and find I’ve been under assessed apparently for 10 years. No, you weren’t. The previous owner had appealed that property and had multitude of issues with that home. But that was back in 97 when I was built. I’ve been there for 10 years. Right. And those adjustments stayed in there.

And we did increase your property. That’s the first time you come to talk to me about that. And then when you came in with not the knowledge of what your value is at. I have to do my job. And when I noticed that Jeh Johnson came into appeal and we have his record too low, we had to do our job and bring that back up. It wasn’t for 20 years you were undervalued because the previous owner did their diligence and lowered that value. Okay, but we. Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed with that house. But last year, and we did lower it down because of those changes that we talked about.

And you sent me pictures. So we lowered it down. And you do still have ag value property. We have you on for 700,000. Okay, now let me finish my whole process here. Okay, so last time I had the assessment done, it was a 15%, actually 14.9% assessment. And it was less than mine because I have a million dollar house. Because I was undervalued. Yeah. So I had a 14.9%. Apparently that’s supposed to bring him up to value. I don’t know. And then this year it was a 37%. So that’s. What’s that, 50? What’s 37 plus 15? Keep in mind.

So the last two assessments, that’s how much I’ve been. Probably because we didn’t physically inspect it. Yeah. So let me finish. So a 37% increase. This, this assessment this year. 37% increase. Nothing’s changed at all since 97. When I have 97. Whenever the House is built, nothing’s changed. The market has changed around. Not 37% from 97. No, no, no. We just established. Gentlemen, gentlemen, excuse me. I just gaveled. Gentlemen, let us allow each other to finish their statements because it started to get a little bit muddled. So, Commissioner Johnson, I believe you have the floor. Please continue.

And please try to refrain from interrupting one another so that it’s easier for the rest of us to follow the conversation. It’s been increased every assessment year I’ve been there. It’s been increased every year. And it was increased last year by 15%. And now this year 37% with no explanation why. And then. And I don’t want to make this personal about me, but I’m not the only. Don’t talk. So I’m done. I don’t mean to be rude about that, but people can’t understand what’s going on. And I don’t want to make it about me, but I have several neighbors who went through the same thing.

I live in a country. I live in the country. I have a house. It’s a custom home. All of my neighbors have custom homes. There’s no other home to compare it to. There’s no home in this county that looks like mine. There’s no home in this county that looks like my neighbors. There’s no home in the county that looks like his neighbors. So they’re all different to Commissioner Lawson’s point, they’re all different. And obviously, you’ve never done an inspection online. It’s gated, you know that you can’t get in. You never done an inspection for whatever reason.

And again, this has happened to my neighbors. It’s been over 30% this year. And it’s not to play catch up since 97 or for the last 10 years, because it’s been catching up, like I said last year, 15%, and now this year, 37%. That’s 52% in two years. That’s huge. And if that is. If that’s what’s happening to other people, just because we didn’t say. I say we government, all of us, we didn’t stay on top of this, and so now we have to play catch up for them and saying, well, you should have been paying this all along.

People can’t afford that. That’s just crazy. That’s just too much of an increase for people to say, hey, all of a sudden, you know, we’re playing catch up this year. You’re not getting a 37% pay increase, but you’re going to pay 37% more. That’s what I think is so unfair about this. That’s why I’m in favor of caps on this kind of stuff. And that’s why I think, you know, we gotta do a better job of staying up on the assessments if that’s the case. And I’m not pointing fingers at anybody, but to all of a sudden, you know, boom, here’s 37%.

That’s not right to me. That’s just not right. That’s not fair to our citizens. That’s just. They don’t understand that process. They don’t understand that, hey, I was undervaluated for this long. They don’t understand. Understand that kind of stuff. They’re not. It’s just. You can’t even read. When you read a property tax bill. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. You know, I’m looking at a property tax bill says the tax year assessed valuation is $55,000, but the home is worth about 6, $6,600,000. I don’t. That doesn’t make sense to most people. Most people don’t understand it. Most people don’t know.

You multiplied that by 19%. That doesn’t show up on here, here, anywhere. No one understands or no one sees in any kind of documentation, hey, this is why I raised it 37% or whatever the percentage was. That’s never explained to them. It’s just, hey, this value goes up, trust us with the government and if you don’t comply, we’re going to take your home from you. I don’t like that. And I think we need to do better. And a lot of it’s not your guys fault. I get that. I’m not accusing you guys. The system we’re in does not work but the system wherein we have to figure out how best that we can working at as a government and say, you know what to put some.

And with mine it was, it went up 37%. And then, and I talked to Tracy about it, they said, well you got this back house. No, I don’t have a back house. I got a, I got a storage for hay. And so okay, well then we lower that. Why did that ever go up? Why was that assumption there without any inspection or anything? Why is the assumption, hey, we’re going to go up here and then if you show us we’ll lower it. It’s like why is the burden on the taxpayer to do that? That shouldn’t be the burden of proof.

Shouldn’t be on the taxpayer. The burden of proof I think should be on the government. Hey, prove me, show me that my house is worth this much. We don’t do it that way. And I think that’s, I just think that that’s wrong. I just think it’s not fair. Again, this isn’t your fault. This is none of your fault. I’m not saying that I don’t like the system. I don’t like how it works. I don’t think it’s fair to our taxpayers. I think it’s just the whole system was with, with property taxes is not fair. It’s not logical.

Let me ask you, how long does it take to do a physical inspection of a house interior and exterior or just a 15 increase the normal inspection you do which like a normal exterior inspection, maybe 20, 30 minutes. If they’re, you know, walking around a house you can get a pretty good idea of what condition that house is in from the exterior. Yeah. How many inspectors do you have? How many people do you have then that do that? 5. I have three commercial staff and five residential. Okay, so let me throw these numbers out at you.

If 387, I’m sorry, 13,857 properties were assessed at over 15% working five days a week, every week, 50 weeks a year. That’s 260 days. That’s over 53 inspections a day that have to be done. You guys doing that many inspections a day? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes it has to be on average every day. 53. You’re doing that many every day of the year? Yep. Of the word, the calendar year, not. I wouldn’t say every day of the year. It’s a two year cycle. So divide that. Okay. So we can double that number. So then be half that.

Be 25, 25 or whatever a day. 26 a day. You know, the bigger the houses are, the slower that process is. Right. So if you’re, you know, if you’re in a neighborhood that’s cookie cutters, you’re seeing, you know, a bunch of little houses. Yeah. You see them a lot faster. You know, out in the country, it’s a lot slower. Yeah. And so the biggest thing for me that, that I have a problem understanding is the process of how houses are evaluated that aren’t like the cookie cutter. You know, I’m in the track. I have, you know, there’s plenty of houses to compare to around.

It’s. Hey, I’m Joanne Lawson. I live out in the country and I have a house that’s completely different than my neighbors. And I just have to go with, oh, they think it’s worth this much Unless I complain about it. I have to accept it. Even if I do, then I have to show proof. And then they’re going to want to come in the government. We’re the government. The government wants to come in and see the inside of my house. People don’t like the that. I don’t like that. And I’ve been working the government my whole life.

I don’t want the government in my house. Me neither. And so, and so that. But that’s the system we’re under that. I just, I don’t like it. So I guess what I’m getting at on this is the owner doesn’t really see what they use to evaluate. It’s just, you just say it’s market value or whatever. And you also talk, someone mentioned about the talk that the market outpaces the assessments. And that’s just because we’re not getting enough assessments done. That’s why it’s outpacing assessment. It’s not, it’s not that the market. And when you look at that line on your chart, When you look at even that, the median appraised value, let’s see, Even that appraised value line, that takes us to 79% right now.

Look how rapidly that’s gone up. That’s taxes that have gone up. That’s taxes that have increased. That’s more taxes that our folks are paying. Forget the 90% level up there, the purple just in the green or whatever it is, the olive color, that’s gone up significantly. And that’s taxes that people are paying. And even if the levies, in most cases, we lowered our levies, but most places aren’t lowering levies. School district isn’t lowering their levies. That hasn’t happened. And so every year when the assessment goes up, taxes go way up. The schools get a ton more money, a ton more money every year because of these assessed valuations.

And to think that because we’re only at 79%, we’re not going to make enough money to fund the government or fund the schools. No, that’s crazy. That’s crazy. That is a ton of money that’s still coming in the. Sorry. Real quick, let me double check my notes. I think he answered most of them. I had a ton of questions here. I think he answered most of them in the presentation. But I guess let me sum up with this. I appreciate you guys. I appreciate what you guys do. I like you. I like Tracy. I like your office.

You guys do good work. Our system is broken. I think no fault of yours. You guys are working within the system that you’re given. Our system is broken. And someone at some point has to stand up and say, hey, we got to do something about the system. We can’t just complain. We got to do something about the system. System. Jackson county capped at 15%. How were they able to do that? Because they didn’t follow their procedures. They were ordered to do that by the state tax commission. Why? Because. Lots of reasons. But it’s primarily because the notices did not go out on time.

That’s the main reason. So people did not have the ability to request inspections, interior inspections. They did not have the ability to challenge that and go to the Board of Equalization. It’s the violation of due process. So it was a timing thing. It wasn’t because the evaluations were the assessment. It’s not because they were excessively valued. It’s because they did not follow the procedure and not because they’re under assessed for some long and all of a sudden they’re trying to bump it up too fast. Oh, that’s the increases. The reason it all played out that way, most likely.

And that’s my concern. That’s my concern with ours. And that’s my concern. Like 15% increase is huge. That’s huge. And to ever have to go over that I think is ridiculous. I just don’t. I just don’t think we need to go for anybody. We need to go over 15. Unless of course, you know, new construction, new additions, whatever, but someone’s been living in their house. You’re not going to see a 50 increase, you know, in the valuation, you know, very often, I’m sorry, in, in the actual increase. This is catch up stuff that we’re doing. And this is.

And it’s a, it’s a. Obviously trace and I differ on, on our opinions on this, but I don’t think we should be playing catch up. And I just wish I, I wish there’s a way we can cap that so that we’re not increasing people’s taxes so much in one year. With that, go ahead. Did you want to comment? No, no, I just waited. Okay. I see. Commissioner Lawson will say something, by the way, had an awful lot thrown at you. Was there any. Anything that you wanted to add? Because there was a lot of conversation. So before we move on, was there anything else that you wanted to add to the conversation? No, I totally understand his point.

With the giant increase, I will say that that’s a very rare case. When you reached out to us that first time a couple years ago is when we started digging into your record. And a lot of those changes were put in there before anybody us that ever even looked at it or knew they were there. And so you’re a very rare case of one where there was a whole lot of adjustments in that record that don’t just. They’re supposed to have codes in there to flag those for us from the past in order to relook at those every so often.

The codes weren’t in there. So when you brought forward your, your 16 or 15% increase, he started looking at. It was like, hey, what are all these adjustments in here? So we, we started digging into it and found, oh, these are all in this record. They need to be fixed. I totally agree with you. Hitting somebody with that all at once isn’t how we would want to do it. We’re given no other option. You’re supposed to appraise them at market. We don’t have the ability as an office to go, hey, we’re going to take discretion on this one taxpayer and we’re going to say, we’re just not going to do it on this guy.

Because then everyone else can file a discrimination suit and say, why didn’t I get that deal? Yeah, my Neighbor got a 30% increase too, though, because you’re if you’re talking about graves, that house had a big giant swimming pool put on the record that there was no permit pulled for that we never had. So when we went out there, they got a neighborhood increase and they got the swimming pool and everything added to that house. So those were stuff that were previously not on the record before. But we actually did a walkthrough of your whole probably several square miles over there of that rural section of the county in the last two years.

Which is why that area specifically had a bit higher increase or catch up is because when we did our market studies in those areas, we were well below market value on a lot of those homes. A house like yours is unique enough that when you’re going to break it down for an appeal process, I would absolutely start putting, pulling comps of similar acreage properties that sold all across the county, looking for similar size and quality homes and then comp it out with that for a fair market value. But for an assessment, you have an ag value there that keeps that from being totaled up.

Right. So we just correct the part on the house itself based on what’s there now and pull some of those adjustments out. We still have it rated as like fair average condition. We didn’t plus it up to good. It’s just whoever adjusted it 15 odd years ago had it way down to like poor condition and that’s not the case. Yeah, I would like to follow up with that and Joe brings a good point. I wish we’d have thought about that earlier. I actually can run a report that shows you of what went up. 15% went up, went up 20 went up with 30, 40, 50.

And we actually did that last week and I don’t quite remember the numbers of something that went up over 15% but I believe there was like 60 properties in Clay county that actually went up over. Was it 60 or was it 30%? Yeah. So there was, I believe around 60 properties that increased up over 50% in Clay County. So it’s a very rare case that somebody jumps that much at one time. Right. So 50 properties in the county, their assessments went up by over 50%. Now again, 5, 0. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. Again you’re going to have to look and extract the ones that had improvements.

Lots of people don’t pull permits. Yeah. And that was the case with your neighbor. That’s why they go up so much and they. That is essentially any of our large increases in one year. That’s because they added a building or they added basement finish or they did a remodel or things like that. But as far as ones that just fall through the cracks like you did with adjustments. And yes, you were underpaying in taxes for those years and we did catch up. Didn’t feel like it. But when you’re underpaying, Jay, everybody that is at their right value is picking up your slack for not paying.

See, this is where we disagree. That is where I mean, I don’t. I can’t afford a million dollar house. And for one, I wouldn’t want to pay the taxes on a million dollar house. But if I did inherit one, I could sell that and I’d have a whole pile of money. But I guarantee, I know for a fact my taxes were more than double yours. Even, Even being. Even being under assessed. Mine were more than double yours. Sure. So why my house? Three houses would fit inside of yours. Yeah, but why is it unfair for me? Why is it.

Why are you saying that’s unfair? I’m not saying it’s unfair. I’m just saying that that’s the way the Missouri system works, is everybody pays on what they own. Yeah. And that’s what I’m saying. But. But what they get in return is the same. Well, you, you say you’re fortunate to have a house. What about the person that is telling me they can’t afford their hundred thousand house? I’m sure they’d love to have a million dollar house, but they can’t because they can’t afford the taxes on it because they know it’s based off fairness. Let’s go. If we could.

So let’s real quick. I’m going to let Victor come up because I think he’ll answer a lot of the questions of this and kind of put this in a little bit more perspective before, before we do that because I guess I wanted to get other commissioners in. Commissioner Lawson has, for the second occasion that I can come up with this evening, been extremely patient. And that patience should be rewarded with a smile and a recognition. Commissioner Lawson, you are recognized. Well, I meant to say this before when you first came up. I appreciate what you do.

And it is when I get my bill every year or every, you know, end of the year, I cry baby about it. But because it’s at Christmas and well, hell, I can’t buy what I want to buy. I got to pay my taxes. But I also appreciate all the things I have in Clay county, the safety and the rest of it. I enjoy it. So I want to thank you and your staff. There have been a Couple of people, businesses as well as residential that have called. And one elderly lady, elderly lady was just on her last leg.

She just was going to lose the house, couldn’t afford it. And you all took care of her beautifully. The one business that I referred to you, he’s gotten a reduction in his taxes this year. He was so grateful and happy and all went well. So I know there’s bad. But I have to say, your staff, any interaction that I’ve ever had with them have been unbelievably professional friendly. Do anything in the world for you. You’ve always been that way as well. And I would. Your mother was wonderful to deal with as well. So I appreciate y’.

All. Thank you. And, and thank you for all that you do. And it isn’t an easy job. You’re bringing bad news. No, I mean, it’s not. We’re talking about 100,000 parcels. And you know, Joe quickly said, we have six filled people. It’s a job. They do a fantastic job. We have 30 staff for personal property and real, real property. We have close to 100,000 properties. Personal property, we have like 150,000 accounts. So with 30 people, I think we’ve done a fantastic job. Job with our assessment. Absolutely. I appreciate you. So please continue on with your next.

Next person to come up, Victor Hubert. Thank you, Ms. Robert. Pleasure to see you. Likewise. Victor Hulbert, Clay County Otter. Also want to thank all the auditor staff. Truly, I’m, you know, I’m just impressed. Have learned a lot myself. And so, you know, I just think we all owe them a day of grad school for the information. You’re not going to see that in other counties to this level, so that’s really impressive. There’s a little bit of daylight left, so I’ll try to speed through this. I only got five or six slides, but I’ll do my best.

Hopefully answers some questions, but I’m always happy to answer more any other questions at the end. So my purpose really, I was asked by the assessor just to give, you know, an angle of this, of we’ve talked a lot, lot about the assessment. Then how is the tax levy set? How is that ultimate property tax bill produced? And that’s something that’s a really important part of the equation as far as how. What it matters to individual citizens. And so that’s what I’m going to really focus on tonight. I think it is relevant because the state auditor of Missouri every year is going to certify every political subdivision’s tax levy that they propose to ensure that quality, that it complies with Missouri state law and the Hancock constitutional amendment.

So first, we’ve already spoken about this through the presentation today that we assess homes based on the market value and we do IT at a 19% assessment ratio. As far as possible reforms we’ve talked about, could that, you know, that number be changed? Who decided 19%? It’s a very good question. What I see is really in setting the tax levies, we kind of have a disjointed process. What I mean by that is we assess down to the individual parcel level. Every single home gets an individual tax assessment, and then the political subdivision set a tax levy based upon that entire assessment.

So to me, that that’s always something I’ve had to question in my time working for the county, is that why couldn’t we, say, set an individual tax rate? So as far as Commissioner Johnson, to your question about what are the ideas for possible improvements long term, I think we certainly have technology in today’s world that that’s. That could be done. And if you were to apply Hancock amendment provisions to an individual tax levy, you know, you might, you might see something. We’ve. And I’ll talk about this a little bit later, but we saw some proposals in the legislature this year that in effect would accomplish this, but by a different means.

Some other methods that municipalities try is that they actually set property tax levies based on the property classification. So the city of Gladstone actually sets a residential real estate property tax levy, a commercial, an agricultural, a personal property. And so that kind of takes out and isolates the true impact of what’s happening in the residential, residential, real estate market versus commercial versus agricultural. So that’s another way to get a little more accurate, something I’ll just mention. But moving on, let’s talk about. Let’s put some actual numbers into everything we’ve discussed today, the general principles behind assessment in Missouri.

So as the assessor said, we have about a $6.7 billion assessed valuation as of 2024. I looked at the tax levies across Clay county, all the political subdivisions of what that tax levy is, and I’m estimating you got an average of about $8 per $100 assessed valuation. Now, to do a true analysis on this, we would really want to kind of weight what is the amount of parcels that pay certain tax levies. But nevertheless, for the illustration purposes, let’s say $8. So if you multiply, as we’ve heard, $8 times the assessed valuation, you would get about $535 million of property tax revenue for all political local governments in Clay County.

The collector’s annual settlement will tell you that that number is a bit higher because of things like back taxes, delinquent taxes that are paid later, the surtax, which is calculated independently and actually not calculated in the levy process. And, but nevertheless you do the straight calculation, it’s $535 million. So under the Hancock Amendment, which is in the state constitution, local governments are limited by how much revenue increase they can have in a year by the lesser of the rate of inflation set by the state tax commission, or 5%. So at the end of 2024, CPI is 2.9%.

So the equation works like this. We’re going to see it this fall in September, as you well know, we’re going to take last year’s revenue times a 2.9% increase. That’s how much local governments can get an increase in revenue from property taxes. So there is that protection in place for taxpayers from an amendment from the 1980s that many folks I’m sure aren’t really familiar with. So the total new revenue in 2025 from property taxes is going to be $550 million. But so what is the reassessment in this odd year, 2025 going to do? The average, when we look back 10 years, has been about 10% growth in odd years in these reassessment years.

Even with that, the spike we’ve seen in that last decade, which would imply an assessed valuation of about $7.36 billion, we do have preliminary information that suggests we’re going to be close to that. We’re missing some final pieces for that total assessment. It very well could be a bit higher when we get that final railroad and utility information in. In fact, the residential real estate increase from the assessor’s information was about 14% from 24 to 25 of total increase in the residential real estate category. So how do we calculate the rollback levy under those Hancock Amendment provisions to get to that only that 2.9% or 15 million dollar increase on the aggregate, you take the permitted revenue $550 million.

You divide it by the reassessment per $100 assessed valuation of 7.36, $7.4 billion. That would mean that the average lead is actually going to have to roll back from about $8 for this illustration to $7.48 per $100 assessed valuation. So that’s essentially how your tax bill is collected. You take the assessed valuation, the 19% of market times the levies for all these political subdivisions which are going to add up to about seven and a half dollars and that’s your total tax bill. So I did want to look at at what is the financial or fiscal impact of if we were to have something like a 15% assessment cap.

The reality is the fiscal impact for the local governments is nothing. The local government still gets the 2.9% increase across the board. So that does not change whatsoever in an assessment cap under the Hancock Amendment provisions of the state of Missouri. I did look at this particular scenario though. As we heard, about 7,000 parcels or so of the residential went up over 15%. It’s about 8%. So but just for rounding purposes, I said let’s say Instead of a 10% aggregate assessed valuation increase, it was only 9% because you know, 10% of that increase was from those households.

Really it’s probably more like, like 0.8 or 0.6 rather because residential real estate is only a portion of the total assessed valuation. But nevertheless, what that means is that total assessed valuation would only go to something like 7.3 billion. All that means under the Hancock Amendment provision is that the levy just wouldn’t roll back as much. The government still gets 15 million in increase. The levy just doesn’t roll back. And on the inverse, if assessed valuation goes down, the levy can actually go up so that the governments can get the 5% or inflation increase up to a certain point up to the voter approved authorized cap.

Right. Cannot go above that. Back to the point about the electoral process of what is the authorized property tax amount. So let’s look at a sample household. For example, you have let’s say two homes that are about $300,000 market value $57,000 assessed. In 2024 that bill was $4,560. So here comes the 2025 reassessment. The 10% increase in assessed valuation household originally would have paid $4,689. But because of the lower rollback on the aggregate, they actually pay a higher tax bill by $43.89. That’s what it’s meant by the taxes are redistributed based on proportional to the assessed valuation.

Whereas if there was a household above the cap at 20% originally, they would have paid $5,116.32 at the $7.48 levy. But if it’s capped for comparative purposes, they would get, they would pay less of the tax burden, $167 less. So that in effect is what would Happen. But that’s only to be fair. That’s only if you compare the status quo to a 15% cap in the first year. If we were in a situation perhaps like California, I’m not familiar with California, but if it was always an assessment cap, then of course there wouldn’t really be this comparison.

Right. Because that burden would, would already be distributed. So that’s, that’s really. I just wanted to kind of put some numbers behind a lot of discussions we had. Basically the local government fiscal impact would not change at all under the Hancock amendment provisions. With an assessment cap, the levy just changes. And so, you know, the legislature threw around a lot of ideas about assessment caps this year. I don’t think any of them move forward, but that just means the levy wouldn’t change or could go up or doesn’t go down as much. Property tax revenue is the same.

Tax bills are more or less going to be redistributed in different ways. As far as Clay county in particular, we have very small property taxes. The assessor brought up that if we’re out of compliance, we would lose our state reimbursement. So that would be a fiscal impact for sure. The only thing I’ll leave you with is that, you know, there have been other discussions about potential property tax reform reform. I’ve mentioned a number of them about change the assessment ratio. As we heard, look at an individual tax rate, a assessment classification tax rate. There have been ideas about tax credits.

We know the senior tax credit. So that is calculated independently of the Hancock amendment. It’s very important to understand. So local governments roll the back their levy and then the credit takes out the revenue, some of the increase. So some proposals that we heard with, I think Senate Bill 3 that passed in the special session would have done a version of that, of a freeze for everyone or a 5% cap on the tax bill. In effect, that would just mean less revenue growth for local governments, but it would be to the benefit of the taxpayer instead of, you know, otherwise.

So those are some thoughts on that. I am happy to answer any questions on that particular analysis. Questions, Commissioner Carpenter, I have no questions, but I do want to thank you. I thought that was very insightful and helpful and so thanks for putting some time into it. Sure. I have to agree that that was, was the thing is it was a realistic real life kind of example. So we could really see how it played through. And there was kind of an apples to apples comparison of what we’re doing here or what we’re looking at. So as always, very you know, very well done.

Any other questions or comments? We are starting to get rather late in the, in the day. Yes, you’re right. Commissioner, are there any members of the public who would like to speak? Okay, I, I, I think I, I’d like to go ahead and cap it off and then this is a discussion item. So I, and we’ll try to figure out whether or not there’s any instruction we want to give to staff. I just want to say that this was a great discussion. It was obvious, obviously fairly long, but this is a subject that is very, very important.

It’s been said this is one of the issues that is most on the minds of our constituents and our citizens and one that bears close examination. I thought one remark that really struck me was one made by Commissioner Carpenter when he was discussing how the levies are certainly impactful. And it’s also been mentioned that we have consistently over the last number of years been lowering our tax levies below Hancock, which has not always been popular, but it’s, I think we’ve been consistent in that. We’ve had a couple of other, that we, thanks obviously to our auditor and our assessor, our former treasurer, we were able to work through a reduction in the surtax, which is also kind of in that category.

We have thanks to all of us, but most especially Commissioner Lawson in the effort to give property tax relief to our seniors. And then finally as an extension, and it kind of plays on the point that the Commissioner had made and that was the other taxing entities, it would be as well for them to be able to understand how that impacts citizens. The example I would give would be the Mid Continent Public Library Committee Commission, which we appoint members to. And we appoint about a third of them, obviously. And because of the actions of this board through the nomination and ratification process, we put members in place that recently actually lowered that levy.

So, so I would like to emphasize in all that that both the auditor and the assessor were very active participants in almost all of those actions. So nobody thinks that up here, but I want to make it clear that I don’t think any of us believe that the assessor is interested in just raising taxes. He’s trying to do the job in the best way he possibly can, as is his staff. And I think his participation in working towards lower property taxes along in concert with many other elected officials and other people here, demonstrate the good faith effort he’s making.

So this has been, I think, a very enlightening discussion, one that I think is good for us to be Having. I don’t know that we have. Are there any commissioners who would like to see us propose any action or is this just mainly information, which is kind of the way I take it. It’s just informational, kind of air things out. Does anybody want to. I see head shakes that we would not be giving instruction to the staff going forward. We can always revisit that later. But at this point it looks like we have exhausted the issue.

So I will shut up and we will continue on with our lives with that. That moves us to the county administrator. Comments. Administrator, I just have a page or two to go over. I’m just kidding. But a couple announcements. First is this week the county received notification from the Government Finance Officers association that the 2025 budget did receive the Distinguished Budget Award. This is the fourth consecutive year in a row that the counties received this. It’s thoroughly analyzed by peers, at least three peers from across the country. They look at it from a communication tool, our policies, our fiscal soundness.

And so great job by staff, department heads, office holders, and certainly our budget team who really put all the work together to create all those documents in the budget book. So congratulations to everybody. That’s great. Great for the county. The second item is county offices will be closed next Thursday, June 19, in observance of Juneteenth. So the commission’s next meeting will be June 26th at 6:00 here in the chambers. Thank you, Commissioner Cummins. Commissioner Carpenter. Thank you. Well, I was going to say some more, but I. But I do think I’ll let everybody get out. Just want to re.

Emphasize that we are very blessed to live in an incredible, exceptional, amazing country. And it continues to be incumbent upon all of us to work together to make it the best country it can be. And I think I’ll just point to our pastor today. I’ll just point to his remarks and would encourage folks to maybe revisit those online if you feel so inspired. Thanks. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Thompson, Commissioner Johnson Wagner. Three quick things. First, again, to the assessor’s office. Thanks for running your marathon. I hope you enjoyed it. You’re welcome back anytime. Number two, happy Father’s Day to those who are fathers.

I hope you have a wonderful Sunday. And finally, my mother turns 80 on Saturday and I want to wish her a happy birthday. Thank you. Very good. Commissioner Lawson, Commissioner Withington. I do want to follow up on the happy Father’s Day. And obviously all fathers have an impact in the lives of their families, obviously. Also, we need to make sure that we recognize those who fill the roles of fathers. In some cases, it’s just a void that is filled. And certainly we want to acknowledge the hard work and sacrifice of the gentlemen among us who fulfill their roles as fathers and those who step in when that is needed and take that position.

And sometimes it is a lady who takes the part of the father in that there is no one else. So someone has to step in and do things. So I would say that just remember those in our lives that have impacted us and are supporting our children. With that, we are adjourned. It.
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