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Sunday, July 29, 2007

Ind. Gov't. - "There's too much wrong to do anything but fix it"

The Indianapolis Star has an outstanding editorial today headed "There's too much wrong to do anything but fix it."

The ILB will pick up right now on just one of the many important points made, near the end of the Star's list:

Something is wrong when taxpayers have to pay $3 each time they want to go on their home computers to see their tax records, or lacking computers have to go down to the City-County Building for the information. This is government transparency at its worst.
For sure. This is something the ILB has planned to write about for some time, but put off because the Star itself has helpfully provided online through its own resources at least some of the information citizens need to be able to understand their property tax situation.

Civicnet is the access-for-pay website Marion County has provided for its taxpayers to access property tax information. Here is the link, but this access-for-pay computer site is closed all day on Sundays and only open part of the day the rest of each week. When it is available it will cost you a minimum of $4.00 to access information about your own residence, and that much again for each additional residence you may want to look at to get an idea of how your assessment ranks against nearby properties. And you will not be able to get your assessment sheet here (the one with the little drawing of your lot and residence that has the assessor's figures). You will need to go downtown for that.

And there is no place in Marion County that the ILB knows of where you can access recent sales figures, a must if you are considering an appeal. That information is available for Boone, Hamilton County, Hancock, Hendricks, and Johnson counties here, via the Indianapolis Star. Each county's page is a little different, the Star's Hamilton County page includes this statement: "The Hamilton County Assessor's Office provides this information, which is available as a public record." Hancock, Hendricks and Johnson contain similar statements.

The ILB was impressed earlier this month by the Governor's appointment of Cheryl Musgrave as the new commissioner of the Department of Local Government Finance because when she was Vanderburgh County Assessor, she put in place a free county website providing all the information mentioned above, and more. See this ILB entry from Sept. 22, 2004. Here is a quote from the Evansville C&P at the time, about an upgrade to the database:

The photographs will be helpful for appraisers, real estate agencies and people shopping for homes, according to [Assessor Cheryl Musgrave ]. She said the goal of her Web site is to provide "everything you need when you're trying to learn about a piece of property," and a photograph "is worth 1,000 words." The feature was created at no additional cost to the county, said Musgrave.
Here is a link to the Vanderburgh County internet database. According to the site description: "This is a website for viewing properties and associated assessment data. You can click on the map to identify or select properties. You can also search for properties and sales."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 29, 2007 08:19 AM
Posted to Indiana Government