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County assessor seeks to reclassify staff and propose new fee schedule for assessment services
Summary
Columbia County Assessor Andrea Jurkowitz asked commissioners to create an assessment supervisor position and discussed a proposed fee schedule for services such as farm deferrals and urban renewal mapping; reclassification will be placed on next week's consent agenda and the fee schedule will be discussed further at a future work session.
Columbia County Assessor Andrea Jurkowitz told the Board of Commissioners on Feb. 12 that she will ask the board to create an assessment supervisor position and reclassify an existing staff member, and she outlined a proposed fee schedule for several assessment office services.
Jurkowitz said the reclassification would slot Joelle Leach into an "assessment supervisor" role, effective March 1, and that the position would include training to perform tax roll duties and supervision of support staff. Jurkowitz said the pay change would be one step above Leach's current pay and that funds are already budgeted through June for the vacancy created by the previous office manager's retirement.
Jurkowitz said the board needs cross-training so the assessor's office is not dependent on a single person to produce the tax roll. "If something should happen to me for any reason ... we need somebody who could then step in and do that big piece of it," she said.
She told commissioners she plans to backfill the resulting vacancy with a GIS technician by July to cover cartography duties as a longtime GIS staffer (Robin) approaches retirement. Jurkowitz said the reallocation would likely save money in the next budget year.
Alongside the reclassification request, Jurkowitz presented a proposed fee schedule for non-statutory services the office performs. She said she compiled fees from roughly half of the state's 36 counties that publish schedules and pared thousands of lines of data to a concise list tied to staff time and an internal hourly rate.
Examples she cited: special-assessment applications (farm or forest deferral) average about five staff hours per application and were estimated at $225; creating the assessor's frozen valuation and mapping for a new urban renewal district was estimated at about 60 hours of combined GIS and appraisal work, or roughly $2,700. Jurkowitz said certain records requests would be charged at the county's public records request rate.
On deferrals, Jurkowitz explained differences between state programs: "With the farm program, you don't collect back taxes" when a parcel is disqualified; forest deferral statutes have different collection rules. She said the office now conducts more site verifications than in previous years and that those checks have reduced long-term improper deferrals.
Commissioners asked for more detail before any fee schedule would be adopted. Jurkowitz characterized the fee schedule as a July 1 earliest implementation target and said she expected to return with additional data, including counts of applications and disqualifications. She also noted the county and assessor community are pursuing expanded assessment funding at the state level, which could change the local need for fees.
The board indicated it would place creation of the assessment supervisor position and the job description on next week's consent agenda for formal action rather than acting at the Feb. 12 meeting. Commissioners also asked staff for a follow-up work session to review statutory constraints and revenue estimates for any new fees.
Ending: The board did not vote on the fee schedule on Feb. 12; Jurkowitz will return with more data and with a reclassification item on the consent agenda for the next meeting.
