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Recorder and surveyor outline staffing, mapping workload and propose assessing/collecting fee increase option
Summary
Recorder/surveyor Jerry Hilton described growing mapping and taxing-district workloads (now 99 taxing districts), asked for reclassifications, training funding, a modest cubicle request, and proposed an assessing/collecting tax-rate option (~9.21%) to raise funds for office modernization and technology.
Recorder and surveyor Jerry Hilton told commissioners that development and annexations have sharply increased workload in the recorder's and surveying offices and that his office needs a combination of staff reclassifications, training funds, and modest workspace improvements to keep pace.
Hilton outlined requests to reclassify several recorder positions to cadastral mapper titles, asked to add one cadastral mapper and one recorder position (he later suggested delaying hiring a new cadastral mapper if internship/capstone programs can fill gaps), and requested an increase in training funds from about $15,000 to $25,000 to support certification training that would reduce the need for future hires.
He said the county now processes 99 taxing districts (up from 46 several years ago) and recently absorbed several large incorporations that required resetting more than 3,000 parcel records. Hilton said those changes contributed to backlogs and that additional staffing support for mapping and data entry would reduce delays in delivering parcel data to the State Tax Commission.
Hilton presented an assessing-and-collecting funding option: a proposed 9.21 percent rate increase for the assessing and collecting fee (not a county-wide property-tax rate change) intended to raise approximately $475,000 (estimated cost to an example household given as $7.70 based on a $475,000 home); he framed it as a candidate for future consideration and said council action is not required immediately. He also proposed establishing a separate billing line for internal survey projects so the office can track and fund project work that currently lacks a stable budget source.
Council members asked whether adding a deputy recorder would satisfy the State Tax Commission's concerns about delayed data; Hilton said hiring would help but the scale of new mapping demands (including 1,300 mining-claim parcels recently provided by the state that could create many new parcel records) makes the work substantial and time-consuming. He offered to provide more detailed counts by email.
