Utah County assessor seeks staff and software upgrades to speed property reviews as growth surges

Chris Polson, Utah County assessor, outlined his office's proposed investments during a budget work session, saying the department needs modest staff increases and new software to handle rapid growth and reduce time-consuming field reviews. Polson told the Board of County Commissioners that roughly 90% of the county's property tax base is real estate, about 70% of taxable value is residential and 24% is commercial, a mix he said shapes staffing and technology priorities.

Polson framed the request around workload and accuracy: "We're very much less [emphasis] on centrally assessed where the state average is 8.6, we're actually around 4%," he said, and noted that residential properties drive the bulk of taxable value. He described a shift in recent years where permit-driven new construction forces staff away from routine property-characteristic reviews and into processing new-build accounts.

The assessor proposed hiring one additional personal-property specialist and two time-limited analysts to respond to a new residential-exemption validation mandate. Polson said the office's personnel costs already constitute most of the budget (he described personnel as roughly 82% of the assessor's budget) and that the 2020 operating budget was about $6,000,000 with a similar proposed level for 2021.

Polson asked the commission to approve several technology and contract expenditures intended to reduce manual workload and appeals. He said a previous continuous-modeling procurement quote of roughly $720,000 over three years was discontinued as too costly; the office will instead trial a module available through its existing SPSS tools for about $500 a month and bring in an intern to test nightly-calibrating models. "Zillow does something like this," Polson said, describing the continuous calibration concept, and added that automated modeling would let staff concentrate on outliers rather than run full-scale revaluations.

On imagery and mapping, Polson said the office renegotiated a six-year extension with Pictometry at an approximately $12,000 annual increase to obtain higher-resolution imagery and expand the county footprint. He described a workflow that converts CAMA sketches into shapefiles, georeferences them over aerial photos, runs pixel-based change detection to flag likely changes, and routes the flagged parcels to a desktop-review tool that integrates Pictometry and GIS. That process, Polson said, will reduce field visits and allow the office to move from a conventional seven-to-eight appraiser review to a two-appraiser, two-year cycle in many cases — cutting staff cost roughly in half compared with conventional methods.

Polson also provided operational detail: new aerials were expected in July and about 14,000 sketches would need update in the GIS, and several projects are contingent on implementation of a new computer system (CAMA) that Polson said should be live by the end of the month. He told the commission the continuous-modeling test and the updated review cycle depend on integration with that new system.

Commissioners pressed Polson on whether upfront technology spending would reduce the county's budget-per-parcel measures over time. Polson said Utah County's growth pattern and management choices make direct comparisons with Salt Lake and other counties difficult, but he argued the investments will improve processes and create redundancy in valuation modeling.

No motions or votes were taken during the presentation. The assessor concluded by reiterating the office's objective to focus on the new computer system implementation and then proceed with the property-characteristic review modernization.