Board of Equalization Meeting   3/27/2025

All right, I will open my note here.

All right, I'm called to order the March 27th meeting of the Board of Equalization of Albemarle County.

We're joined today by Mr. Andrew McRoberts, an attorney representing the Board of Equalization.

Mr. McRoberts may have met some of you before, but there are others who may be new.

So could we briefly just go around and if you'd introduce yourself to Mr. McRoberts and give him a sense of a background and your interest in the board, and then we can move on from there.

Okay.

I'm Frank Friedman.

I've lived in Albemarle County since 1999.

My field is higher education, especially community college education.

Worked in community colleges for 45 years, the last 23 of which I was president of Piedmont Virginia Community College here in Charlottesville.

I retired in 2022.

Now I spend my time on a handful of boards.

I teach a couple of classes as an adjunct and I'm a CASA volunteer working with kids in foster care.

Welcome.

My name is Bob Beard, fourth year on the Equalization Board.

I am on this because my supervisor Jim Andrews asked me to do this four years ago.

I am a retired journalist, local news person, and real estate investor, and rental property owner.

in retirement.

And this is probably going to be my last year because I have been asked to run for the school board in Samuel Miller, and I'm going to go ahead and do it.

Thank you, Bob.

Thank you.

I'm Dave Norford, lifelong resident of Albemarle County and farm with my family out in the Stony Point area.

And this is my second year on the board.

I'm Evan Mayo.

I represent the Scottsville, no, Monticello?

Yeah, okay.

Scottsville.

I'm here with a purpose.

I'm David Mitchell.

I've been here about in Almar County about 20 years.

My wife grew up here, so we moved back.

I work for Great Eastern Management Company.

We manage apartments, shopping centers, office buildings in town and one place in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Do some development.

Thank you.

I'm Bill Howard.

I moved here in 1965 to teach school.

It didn't last long because I wasn't going to live on that salary.

Got into real estate 52 years ago.

I own my own company, Real Estate 3 Commercial Properties.

I also own a residential company, Bill Howard & Associates, and do a little bit of property management, not very much, mostly commercial.

Sure, sure.

I've practiced law for 35 years.

I'm at Sands Anderson out of the Richmond office, but we practice local government law all over the state.

I've represented BOEs before.

Do a lot of tax assessment defense for local governments, made some law in the Supreme Court from time to time.

And, you know, I know quite a bit about assessments and how BOEs work.

So I'm glad to be tapped by your county attorney to assist you all.

I don't know if you saw a conflict or just an opportunity to pass the torch.

Thank you.

We do.

We do.

We've helped them do various things, including acquire real estate.

We've helped them with some employment issues from time to time and, you know, some litigation, I think, also.

Saenz Anderson has a very large group of government lawyers.

We have sort of the education school side that represent over 80% of the school districts.

On the local government side, I'm the head of the local government team, as we call it at Saenz Anderson.

And we represent about 25 localities as chief counsel.

We also defend their litigation.

We also do all of the, you know, any public finance, bonds, loans, things like that.

We also do public employment, federal litigation, you name it.

There's very little that local governments need as far as legal services that Sands Anderson can't provide.

So, you know, this is kind of one of my niches.

Okay, thank you.

Yes, under 2.2.37.11.A.8, you can go into closed session to receive the advice and consult your lawyer.

There are certain things that FOIA provides as an exception that probably don't apply to you, like you can't go in for even sensitive deliberations.

There's an attorney general's opinion on that.

I, from personal litigation experience, I know you can't be sued, which is good news.

And so, you know, you can't consult your lawyer about probable litigation because I don't think there is any.

But generally speaking, all of the exceptions to FOIA that apply for other public bodies would apply to this public body.

So I think we've got an agenda to get through, but maybe we could take a straw poll at some point and see if anyone else is prepared to have that conversation with Mr. McRoberts.

If so, we can go into closed session and have it.

If it'd be better to schedule, I know this is the first meeting of the year, if it'd be better to schedule another one in a month or two, we may be able to do that as well.

Okay.

Does everyone have- One other idea Evan on handling that is just like the email exchange we just had.

You could send me questions in writing and I can respond to them.

All right.

So has everyone received a copy of the minutes from the August 8th, 2024 meeting, the last meeting of the previous iteration of the board?

Did anybody have,

corrections or revisions for those minutes.

Hearing none, I'll ask if there's a motion to approve the minutes as prepared by the Assessor's Office.

They have to approve them.

Thank you.

Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

All opposed?

The motion passes unanimously in the August 8, 2024 minutes are accepted, approved.

Item number five, officer responsibilities.

So we don't have a full slate of officers, but we do typically use a chair, a vice chair, and a secretary position.

For those of you who are just joining the board, the chair does the job I'm doing now, just a meeting expediter, more or less, maybe a little bit of additional communication responsibility with the individual, the people who lodge the appeals, to give a little preamble.

There's a vice chair who actually gets a fair bit of run here, not like a backup quarterback, because we have so many meetings, we just haven't, most people couldn't make every single one.

So that's a backup position for the expediter role.

And then there's a secretary position, which is actually kind of critical.

We are backstopped by the assessor's office who have corrected a few transpose numbers for me when I was the secretary.

And they're very good at it, but we do record on pre-produced templated minutes, whether the assessor's

calculation or assessment of the property would be adjusted, and if so, in what direction, and into what the new assessment number is.

So if you have wandering attention, like I do sometimes, that can be a challenging role, but that's the only other one that's kind of a critical role.

Does anyone have any questions about those responsibilities?

And just to add one thing, the chair, and I think the chair and the secretary both sign change letters after the fact, and who is just the chair signs the no change letters, I believe.

I should have said that.

It's so easy because you guys prepare everything so comprehensively.

It's just kind of a five-minute stop, but there is one additional trip to the county building a couple of weeks later to sign those.

We do need to choose officers for the upcoming year, and I guess we could start with the chair.

I think I've been the chair for two years now.

I'm quite willing to step aside and let someone else ascend to the position if anyone has an interest.

All right, all in favor?

All right, thank you very much, Dave.

Mr. Mayo, Mr. Mitchell, are you keeping track of?

As secretary.

of the votes that you've done?

I have provisional notes also.

Oh, you do?

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Okay.

Bob served as our vice chair over the past at least year, maybe two years.

Oh, my school board rep, Graham Page, is retiring.

He has stepped up and said, would you be interested in doing this?

I've been active in boards for, I don't know, four or five years.

And I decided, I don't know, two or three weeks ago just to do it.

That's wonderful.

Well, I'm sure you'll

You'll have your hands quite full with that.

Is there anyone else who would be willing to be considered nominated as for the vice chair position?

Does anyone, do I hear a nomination for Bob then?

Thank you, Frank.

Is there a second?

All those in favor of installing Mr.

Beard for his third year as the vice chair?

Aye.

All opposed?

All right.

The motion passes unanimously and Mr.

Beard will be the vice chair for the upcoming year.

And then the last position that we need to elect into is the secretary role.

Is anyone willing to be considered for secretary this year?

All right.

Very good.

Is there a nomination?

I nominate Dave Mitchell for secretary.

All right.

I'll second it.

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

All right.

Mr. Mitchell, thank you for your service.

Okay.

So those of you who haven't had a chance to work with the assessor staff,

Pete suggested that we have a little bit of opportunity to interface with them and get an understanding of their background and their role in the office.

So does it work for your team to introduce themselves and just give a little bit of an explanation about how they will interact with the Board of Equalization in the upcoming year?

So I'll just start with myself.

I've been the assessor here for 10 years.

and have over 30 years of appraisal or assessment experience.

So I will be at all meetings unless something unforeseen happens.

and if I'm not then Billy Taylor is always at the meetings.

Now Billy Taylor you're probably all familiar with at least through email.

She's always involved in everything related to Board of Equalization.

She makes sure that everything runs smoothly in the background.

So Billy Taylor is my deputy assessor and she has quite a bit of experience also in

in Appraisal in an Assessments Office.

She's been in this office for 25 years, close to 25 years, and she pretty much runs the residential side of the Assessor's Office, so I have a lot of confidence in Billy Taylor.

Lewis Herndon.

Lewis, stand up for a second.

So Lewis is a supervising appraiser.

So he supervises four or five of the residential appraisers in my office.

He will be present any time, either his properties that he appraises or his appraisal staff appraises.

He'll be in the board meeting to assist or answer questions.

and Louis has quite a bit of experience also in both the fee world and assessor's offices in Gloucester and here.

And Deb Collier is an MAI.

She's a very knowledgeable, extremely knowledgeable commercial appraiser with a lot of knowledge of the local area, local market.

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable when it comes to commercial work.

I've done it my entire career and Deb leaves me kind of in the dust for what she knows and her ability to research.

So I'm very excited that Deb is with us.

She will be present for any of the commercial appeals and will present information to you.

And while I'm introducing that, I'm going to go ahead and jump to, I gave you all several documents.

One of them is the bound copy.

In the past, every time we had a commercial appeal, we would attach

The background information like support for cap rates and information like that to the appeal this year we have this document which has all of the kind of all combined together all of the cap rate information and sales that go with

with all of the different income properties.

And this is going to be kind of the backup resource in any one of those appeals.

So this is a copy for you.

It's up to you whether you want to leave it with us and we'll bring it to the meetings or if you want to keep it and have it with you.

Because one of the questions we're going to ask you later is how you want us to get the information to you for each hearing.

We typically send it to you via email about a week in advance so that you can review it prior to the meeting.

Do you want that to continue like that?

Do you want us to bring the notebooks with the printed copies to the meetings for you?

All that.

So we're going to have you determine what you want us to do for that to get the information to you.

But I wanted to share this with you because this is an exciting, you know,

Thank you, Mr. Lynch.

You're welcome.

I didn't miss anybody.

My front office staff is very integral in doing the background work, preparing the minutes and preparing the letters that are sent out afterwards.

Mark is here, Mark Voico from my administrative staff.

Any questions for Pete or his staff about what was just explained?

Okay, hearing none.

For new members, there's a training authorized or required, I should say, by the General Assembly, I believe.

I've scheduled it I can't remember the date it's the first one in April 10th yeah I signed up for that.

Scheduled but I'm gonna be out of the country until 25th of April will be on May 8th.

Would we have scheduled any meetings prior to that?

No, sir.

That'll work great.

I did have a question.

Is that in person or is it virtual?

Okay.

Very good, all right, thank you.

So,

Mr. Lynch's office had prepared this Board of Equalization roster that you have in front of you.

I have one change where it has home phone.

We finally cut the cord with a landline so we no longer have that number.

We did notice there were a couple of them.

I know Mr. Mitchell and one other had second year needs training.

The needs training part is that we're deleting off that.

OK.

Okay, there's no further corrections.

Would it be possible to identify our attorney as part of this roster?

Yes, we can add that information to it.

No, that would be fun.

The only cautionary tale I would share is that if you don't want applicants to reach out to me, then putting me on the list may not be the best idea.

This roster is for internal use only.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't be FOIA'd, but it's not something we publish.

It's not something that's on the website or anything like that.

In that case, I withdraw my suggestion.

I don't think it would be necessary.

Well, I don't mind doing that.

I just think that y'all need to be intentional about how you use my services because certainly the county's picking up the bill.

OK.

Very good.

All right.

So we do have time here for conversation with Andrew, legal questions.

Does anybody have any burning questions that have arisen since last year?

Or maybe the new members have questions about kind of general principles of liability and FOIA or compliance with vFOIA, anything like that?

So I would ask, Andrew, I think in the past, over the last couple of years, there's been,

At the very least, like a lack of perfect alignment on what constitutes a public record, what is a piece of scrap paper or a doodle versus what's something that needs to be very careful that we gather it up at the end of the meeting and turn them back into the Assessor's Office for maintaining.

Sure.

The definition of a public record is very broad.

If it's in your possession and it has to do with your public business, then it's probably a public record.

That includes notes and documents you might have gathered in the pursuant to your duties, et cetera.

But there's a difference between

being a public record and being something you have to retain and maintain and hand over to the archivist and, you know, get at least a hand slapped by the Library of Virginia if it doesn't get preserved forever.

So, for example, notes.

Notes are public records.

No real way around that.

But notes don't fall into any category under the Records Retention Act.

that need to be retained because they're just really for your convenience, for whatever purpose you may want them for.

And when you're done using them, you can throw them away or.

You know, burn them in your fireplace or whatever you want to do with them.

There's no need to retain them.

Unlike things like your minutes or your official BOE orders, things like that need to be retained and archived and all of that.

Certainly the minutes, the recordings, those things like that need to be retained a certain period of time.

but not informal notes and things like that.

I will say that as a public body, you all are subject to all the requirements of FOIA that a public body is subject to, whether it be the board of supervisors, the school board, or any other committee or agency, planning commission, et cetera of Albemarle County.

And that means that all of the rules apply.

With records, I've kind of given you the basic rule.

Everything's FOIAable.

I'd imagine that if you get a request for records, then you'll be working with Pete to try to arrange that.

I think there's a FOIA officer.

here at the county that you can probably work through as well.

Certainly, I can answer any questions about that.

On the meeting side of FOIA, you know, they say, you know, two by two, you enter the ARC, two by two, you're not a meeting.

And but three or more, it is a meeting.

and not if you're discussing the Cubs game, not if you're discussing your kids' schooling, but if you're discussing BOE business, that's a meeting if you have three or more of you together.

So just be aware that as you all gather in the community, whether it be a civic occasion or a PTA meeting or anything else you might be at,

Avoid discussions of this if there's three of y'all there.

If there's two of y'all, great.

Have that discussion.

It's not a meeting.

And that's basically the basics of meetings.

Any meetings you have here are clearly going to be recorded and their minutes going to be prepared.

And there's Albemarle staff assigned to make sure all of that happens just fine.

I will say that

Virtual participation is authorized both by FOIA and by your bylaws.

In order to do that, there's a remote participation policy that needs to be adopted before you do that.

If you all always intend to be here in person, it's not really an issue, but if somebody's in the hospital room or in Hawaii and wants to call in and join in the proceeding,

There is a way to do it.

We just need to make sure that you all adopt a policy before you do.

My guess is there's very similar policies throughout the Albemarle County government that we can adopt or some very similar ones.

There might even been one in the past.

Can I ask, is that not covered by the entry in the rules of

procedure.

Yeah, I have.

You know, it really just says that remote participation is pursuant to 2.2 3708.3, which is fine.

There's nothing wrong with that.

All it really does is adopt the things that are statutory and it provides the guidelines.

I'm not sure why they require a policy.

I've never seen a public body deny virtual participation, you know, under the statute, but technically that's what it says.

What I can do is I can just ask Andy if he has a virtual participation policy lying around that he can send me in a Word document and then I can send it to y'all or I can edit it and send it to y'all and y'all can adopt it at your next meeting.

It's not a big deal.

Okay.

And then relating to the notes, as Mr.

Pick Andrews was talking about, we give you packets each time, paper packets, and sometimes you might write notes on there.

And as soon as the meeting is over, and I believe you can correct me if I'm wrong, the Library of Virginia says that as long as those notes are no longer needed,

Then you can dispose of them immediately.

So we do.

As soon as the meeting's over, unless that hearing is going on to another meeting, which rarely happens, has happened, but it rarely happens, we will immediately destroy all of those notes afterwards, with the exception of one

One clean record for the files and of course the minutes and the other things that are required.

Yes.

So that's really helpful.

A question that had occurred to me in the past is if there are three or more Board of Equalization members, say, eating lunch together in between sessions, is there any distinction between open public business and a recollection of a particular case, say, last year that we may have heard?

Does that constitute conducting public business?

Could it potentially be considered a meeting or because the appeal is no longer pending or it's been decided?

If you're swapping old war stories I don't think that constitutes the content of a meeting but if you're discussing it because it's relevance to your current work I think it certainly crosses that line and it'd have to be a factual determination at that time.

Well, once it becomes a meeting, then there are other requirements like making sure the public has access to it.

There are minutes taken, things like that.

So it's best just to avoid it as a meeting at all.

If in fact you all decide to do a BOE meeting over lunch on the downtown mall, that's a wonderful thing to do in the spring.

But it may not be the greatest place because then you have to let the public know

That's your meeting on the downtown mall for lunch and don't be surprised if somebody shows up and wants to sit at the next table and listen because they have the right to do that.

So it's really just best to avoid the three or more discussing the business of the BOE, you know, while y'all are on the BOE.

I'm sorry, Mr. Mayo.

I was actually thinking of when you have a full day of hearings and at lunch, you guys are talking about something.

I wasn't even talking about a different day.

All right.

We had the same idea.

Okay.

Okay.

So that's helpful.

I wanted to

Ask also, there's been instances over the past few years where someone who has appealed a tax assessment and I will have a independent recollection of what that property looks like or I've driven by it or I've lived near it, something like that, where I have

Information outside of the universe of facts presented through the appellant or the person challenging it.

Is it permissible or advisable or not advisable to rely on that information in making a determination about whether the appellant has carried their burden of proof?

Yeah, I think it's best to let the applicant sort of share the information they want to share because it's their burden and their claim.

On the other hand, you are a quasi-judicial body, not a completely judicial body.

And I think that as a public body, I think you're expected to know stuff because you live in the community.

And many of you all have been here many, many years.

I think there is also a reason the General Assembly says that at least some of you all have to have

you know, ties to the real estate community, et cetera.

I think that it's certainly clear that you're expected to know stuff about your community.

So I don't think you can just leave that at the door.

I think good practice might be if there's something critical that you think is swaying your decision that's not in the record.

I think good practice would be to disclose that to your fellow BOE members and say, hey, I know personally that this is the way that property is set up or whatever.

Thank you that's helpful and I note that we you know I'm responsible for swearing in the witnesses so to me that would

You know, I have the ability or I'm authorized to assess the credibility and disbelieve if it doesn't seem credible testimony of, I guess, either the assessor's office or the appellants.

Well, as far as testimony, I mean, people are under oath.

I mean, there are criminal penalties that in theory could be brought upon them for lying under oath.

However, you don't have the power to punish them.

However, you do have the complete authority to deem them credible or not credible.

to take what they have to say seriously or not, depending upon how you take it.

You are, again, quasi-judicial, just like judges have people lie to them on the stand all the time.

We hope that that doesn't occur in our country, but it does.

Well, clearly criminal activities are the job of your local law enforcement and the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office.

You know, I don't think you ought to routinely refer things to their office.

I think that the best penalty initially is to just simply, you know, weigh evidence and make a decision accordingly.

If you want to call somebody out and say, I don't find them credible, you can say that.

You know, that's certainly permissible.

As far as criminal referrals, I wouldn't recommend them.

Misdemeanors are typically 12 months.

I have a question.

It was brought to my attention that a property owner in my district was unhappy with his assessment, reached out to the supervisor who wanted my contact information.

She wouldn't give it to him.

But if he gets it and if he calls me, I was just going to tell him I can't even talk about it.

It has to go through the process of this board.

I think that's perfectly fine.

I think it's probably best practice.

But I will say that that's up to the individual BOE member.

You know, again, if you have information outside of the meeting that is relevant to your decision making, then you really probably ought to disclose it.

And I would just want to add, my office will never say, oh, Mr. Mayo is the representative from your district and, you know, we

And that's really best practice.

Again, y'all are a body.

Y'all make decisions as bodies.

And so, you know, you're not a political elected body.

I understand that you represent the board and for others who may not have been in this situation before, suppose that someone foiled me specifically and said, Evan, I'd like to have all the text messages you've ever sent about the board of equalization.

I believe so.

I mean, as long as they're foiling you because you are the member of the BOE and you know, that's it.

Yes.

Yes, I would.

You know, hopefully we could resolve it by simply giving them the documents so that it's not a lot of legal time involved.

Yeah.

And that's one thing to say is not just sort of notes and things sounds like to me, Pete, and the folks have a process to deal with that kind of a thing.

But you should be aware that emails, texts, things like that that are about public business are also public records.

So I would keep them to a minimum.

And certainly I

I don't know how often it happens but sometimes an applicant is angry or suspicious or doesn't trust the system and they'll FOIA and so it's best just not to have anything to give them because that makes the answer easy.

Well, it does have to be real-time communications.

There was a case many years ago where there was an exchange between members of the Fredericksburg City Council and the Supreme Court came down and said, well, that wasn't a meeting because while they were all, at least a quorum was involved in the discussion, it wasn't simultaneous.

But just because it's not a meeting doesn't mean that those aren't public records, disclosable under FOIA if you ask under the documents portion of FOIA.

I believe you do.

I think that the process is probably not laid out very well in the statute.

So if you want to do something like that, let me know and I'll dig into it a little bit.

I'm interested.

I'll make a note.

Thank you.

Anything further?

As a fellow practitioner, you quite capably answered all of those questions, none of which I had told you I was going to ask in advance.

So we're grateful to have your expertise and thank you.

Oh, you're welcome.

Mr. Mayo, and as I told you a little while ago, I forwarded the email that Mr. McRoberts sent of the two questions that you had asked in advance from before.

So one of those relates to

being able to require an interior inspection in order to do an appeal.

And the answer to that was no.

And I forwarded that to all six of you so that you could see his answers.

But I included, I wasn't actually going to ask this year if

If we could require an interior inspection.

But once that question came up, I just went ahead and included that in the agenda.

But, you know, I want to strike that from the agenda or just skip over that one, since the answer is no.

So for the new members of the board who are not privy to the conversation,

There was a question that arose last year about whether we could condition an appeal on an agreement by the person appealing the assessment to allow the Assessor's Office to access the interior of their home.

And the reasoning for this was that the interior condition of the property is

somewhat essential information for the assessor to feed into their mass appraisal technique.

And when access is denied, it's very difficult or more difficult for the assessor's office to produce an assessment or a defense of their assessment that's of maximum usefulness to us and of maximum accuracy.

So that's the backstory there.

Mr. Chairman.

If I can elaborate on that.

I think the answer is no, because the way it was phrased to me is, can I require an interior inspection?

And if they don't give it to us, can we just, you know, not hear their appeal?

I think the answer to that is no.

I think you do need to hear their appeal and you need to make a decision.

However,

If you ask for information that's reasonably appropriate to receive and they refuse to give it to you, then you can take that as a matter of credibility again.

And the taxpayer does have the burden.

So that may not be a good thing for them to refuse to let you do.

Any further questions on that point of clarification?

So I would say generally, it's a one of like a simplified version of probably most of the boards that you've served on.

Call each of the cases as they come up.

We give a short explanation of what we do and the types of evidence that we could hear, which tends to be kind of important because people don't always know what they are allowed to say or what would be persuasive to us under the guidelines that the General Assembly has given us.

And then there's a period where the person challenging the assessment can argue for a reduction on certain enumerated grounds in the statute, which I think is about

Okay.

Yeah.

So sort of a initial opening argument and then a reply sometimes, which is waived.

And then if we can, we try to

deliberate and talk it through and make a decision right away.

But if needed, we can defer it and have further consideration.

There's been a couple of cases where we've asked for additional information to feel like we could make a decision.

and if they stack up, in my experience, it's difficult to pull the individual evidentiary submissions apart at the end of the day.

When you've heard 16, I feel like to the extent that we can, we've always been better served by deliberating immediately.

Any questions about any of the procedures?

During an appeal,

Will the appellant generally bring video?

Is that permissible?

We've not had anyone be so bold to do a walkthrough video.

We normally have had, I guess, .png or .jpg images that are submitted as attachments to emails, usually through the assessor's office.

There's oral testimony.

There's sometimes written submissions.

There's sometimes sort of sourced expert reports like a broker's opinion letter.

And then obviously the people who are challenging commercial or multifamily property or industrial or those are much more substantial, you know, a hundred times the size and backed by consulting reports and aggregated data about the performance of the business that inhabits the property.

Okay, I would just encourage you to review the rules of procedure when you have a moment.

Are we taking out this 5.3?

Yes, so that's one thing I wanted to bring up.

So I had sent both last year's rules of procedure and a draft of this year.

The draft, the only difference is that interior inspection.

If you would, I think it probably will be cleaner if you just adopt the same version as last year as your rules for this year.

unless you have some changes other than those proposed changes I was discussing.

That's correct.

So what I'm proposing is that you would take the 2024 rules of procedure that are not changed in any way, and adopt those again as your 2025 rules.

All in favor?

Aye.

Anyone opposed?

The motion passes unanimously.

The 2024 rules of procedure will be updated wherever so needed to 2025 with no further substantive changes.

Mr. Lynch, could you please give the board a briefing on the status of the appeals as you've received as of today?

That is correct.

And just to be clear, there's there's a initial deadline and then there's a rolling deadline.

So in Almar County, March 30th is the deadline to appeal to the to the Board of Equalization.

Because it's on Sunday, it's actually Monday this year.

So we will accept appeal applications through Monday.

However, if a review was requested by my office, the deadline to file to you is 30 days after I respond to that review.

So we keep track of all of our responses.

And anyone who requests the Board of Equalization

Application, so that we have rolling deadlines for those parcels specifically that go through another, well, there's still a response I haven't sent yet, so that will keep going through the next 30 days at least.

But as of right now, what is the current status, Billy Taylor?

Okay.

Okay, so far we have, in Albemarle we control the, so we don't have somebody who says, who turns in an application that we're unaware of, we control the application.

So we number them and send them out when they're requested and then they have to be returned by the deadline.

We have sent 41 applications out and we've received seven back.

Of those seven, is it two additional on top of this?

Okay, yeah, there were nine returned to us and two have been withdrawn since then.

In some cases, they'll appeal to you, but then we'll make an adjustment on review and then they're happy with that adjustment and they withdraw their appeal.

And so that

I believe so.

It's gone way up and down.

Now we had 18 one year and 60 some the next year.

So it really matters the public mood, I think, and what they're expecting in a value change, what they hear in the media, and then what they see in their assessment change.

So the big event that we need to do today is to determine, compare the five-way comparison of our schedules or six-way comparison of our schedules to determine the dates that we can publish in advance for people to schedule their hearings.

So is everyone prepared to choose hearing dates today and hopefully hold more than we need and then we can release them as we go?

Yes.

and Mr. Mayo, we are hoping to start the hearings sooner than we have in the past.

So we were looking at the, was it the end of May?

I'm sorry, the end of April?

like the last week of April of you starting your first hearings, if that's acceptable to you.

And we would still like to have, we never know the final volume until it happens, but if you could have 10 hearing dates, we can advertise them and then you'll end up not using them if not needed, but it's better to have them already set and advertised.

That's 10 hearing dates for the prior to September 1st annual reassessment hearings and then one per month after September.

Thank you.

So I would like to make a request this year and see how the other board members feel about it.

It would be easier for me to hold more half days than to hold the full days as we've done previously.

and it seemed like a lot of the time we didn't end up using the full eight hour block.

So that is one suggestion I wanted to make or maybe some of each, right?

Some half days, some full, and that might provide more flexibility.

I agree.

So nine or 830?

It started.

830.

And prior to the last couple of years, we always did, or the board always did half days.

They'd, you know, like for example, they would do Tuesdays mornings and Thursday afternoons or something like that.

My, my experience is that like by the,

10th or 12th or 14th appeal.

It's very difficult, particularly like the bigger projects with voluminous spreadsheets and calculations.

Sounds like you have other boards you've got to appear on behalf of.

Okay.

Well, what would work best here, Pete?

I cannot do Tuesdays.

No Tuesdays.

Does anyone else have a hard,

No on any of the days of the week.

Does your office have any preference on that?

I would also prefer not Fridays, but I can make Fridays work.

Just for me, my management team meets Wednesday mornings.

So if we can avoid that, then it would be better for that schedule.

I will be out of town the last week of April.

So the earliest I could start would actually be May 1.

I'm available.

You talking about morning?

I think we've, you know, what's your pleasure?

And I can do mornings on that day.

Is everyone available on the morning of May 1?

Yes.

Okay.

Could everyone hold 830 to say 1 o'clock?

On May 1.

How many full dates are we looking for here Pete?

Would four or five be enough?

Full days?

No, half days.

and I'm thinking, you know, each appeal's like 20 minutes, right?

Now, you were talking about this earlier.

It's always difficult to balance how much time to assign to each one because some of them will go on and on, you know, if you don't rein them in and some of them require you guys to discuss more.

So, we never know until the hearing actually happens and it's,

We don't want you sitting there waiting a long time for the next one.

We used to do hour for each, but we also don't want you not having time and then you have them all bottled up at the end of the day.

So.

Thank you, Billy.

Is there a way I can do that while I'm away?

Access online.

Yeah, those two combinations of things probably don't go well together.

If you kind of challenge with the computers and you're trying to do it from, I would say you probably can't, we can't do any public business out of the country.

So I would say that's probably not an option.

So May 8th, I mean, I'll be back, I'll be here.

Okay.

But I don't have my training until the 8th.

One option, Mr. Mayo, is that we don't schedule any commercial properties until after that, and the rest of the board can go ahead and hear some of the residential properties.

It's completely up to you.

This would be residential only.

Yeah, we'd have the quorum, just a majority.

So let's do that.

If we can all hold that date, May 1, that's one of the four.

And then do we want to look at the following week?

Or actually two weeks after that, I guess, would be the next good spot.

The 15th, I think I can't do the 15th.

Any other date that week that someone would propose?

Yeah, I can't do the 15th either.

All right.

I can do the 12th.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is good for me.

And you said you can't do Friday?

Correct.

That's the 16th.

So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday that week.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Right.

OK.

OK, good.

What was the time period on May 1st?

830 to 1.

830 to 1.

the understanding that we'll likely come in well beneath that.

This is where I run into a problem.

Okay, so that would leave only that Thursday.

It'd probably be hard to read the materials when you're traveling back.

Shall we start then on the June 9th, the week of the June 9th for the third hearing date?

Hang on a second.

Yeah.

Yeah, that works.

Good.

If everyone would hold that, please.

Will that give enough time?

Pete, would anything be filtering in later than that?

Should we go out two weeks or three?

What do you mean?

No, the 12th would be fine.

That way we can

Yes, sir.

I'm good on that.

Good.

Good.

Thank you.

How many more should we try to reserve?

Really, okay.

Four more, eight half days.

Okay, four more, please.

The 19th is a holiday.

Oh, Google Calendar needs to update.

Okay.

So the 16th though is available for everyone?

So that's hearing day number five.

And then skipping Wednesday.

Same time.

Skipping Wednesday for the assessor's office, Friday for anyone traveling 19th for holiday.

We could look the following week

What about... You said you're not doing Fridays.

I could, but it's after a holiday.

Might not get good uptake from the citizens.

I can do the 23rd if you're just going to bang out week after week.

Yes, I could do the 23rd.

23rd?

That's a good idea.

Is anyone not able to make an afternoon date on the 23rd?

That's fine with me.

What would the times be?

Okay.

We say 1230 to 430 or five.

And we're talking about June 23rd?

Yes.

1230 to five?

Yes.

That's number

Five or six?

Six.

Okay.

Following week, I cannot do anything that week.

I've got a trial.

About the 26th.

26th.

Yes.

I'm available.

Is anyone not available eight afternoon as well, I guess, on June 26th, 1230 to five.

All right.

So that's seven.

Following week, I cannot do, but what about the week after that?

Everyone available then?

30th.

I cannot do the week of the 30th.

No, that'd be end of July.

Sorry.

Yeah.

The July 4th week is probably not good.

No.

Okay.

Not the next Monday.

What date are you looking at?

I would suggest a little later in that week just because it's following the July 4th weekend.

Good argument.

10th is good.

Morning or afternoon?

Either one.

Let's do morning.

Yes sir.

Is anyone unable to make

June, July 10th, 830 to 1 p.m. for hearing date number eight.

All right.

Hearing no objection.

Now, that's eight dates, I think, if my counting is right.

Can we have, do we want to have one in August just as a backup for something that is, what do you refer to in court?

Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

Late August or early?

Probably middle sometime.

What about August 14th?

Anyone?

I'm good with that.

I can't be here in person.

I could do virtual.

I'm not out of the country, but I'm at the beach.

I could do it.

I mean, I could do it, but.

Remember, you've got adequate, you know, six people on the board.

That's true.

Okay.

Anyone else at the beach on the 14th?

Where?

It'll all go down there.

August 14th, we're going to do morning.

I prefer morning if no one else has an objection.

So you're saying that we need one in each month or one in each month?

Yes, please.

So September, what's Labor Day again?

First.

So what about the 11th or the 8th of September?

That'll be fine.

Yeah, I can do morning.

Now this was likely to be a short one too because of being last.

I mean, it's so rare that we get these supplemental appeals.

If we do get one, it would probably be one property.

Right.

And then October, maybe if you just try about a month after,

It should be the week of the 13th.

13th, Columbus Day.

And I'm in trial the rest of that week, so I have to go either one forward or one back.

Anybody have a preference there?

6 will be for me.

October 6th.

Yep.

Anyone not due October 6th, 830 to 1?

Good.

Okay.

Good.

That's hearing date number 11.

October 6th, 830 to 1.

and then forward a month, November 3rd, it's like elections.

Bob's going to be busy that day.

Nah, I'm not going to.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

That's BUE hearing date number 12.

and then just one more in December.

I would ask that we put it earlier in the month, things get kind of dicey for me after about the 15th.

Anyone got the opposite schedule or earlier the better?

Okay.

About the eighth.

Yes.

Okay.

Second.

All right, so that'd be hearing date number 13, I think.

That's good.

December 8th.

Okay, so what is your preference for location for rooms?

Is this room your preferred place to do your hearings?

What does the board prefer?

I'll put in my two cents worth as an old man who can't hear very well.

Can you?

It probably is a little more comfortable for somebody coming in.

I agree.

I just wanted to get your preference.

Sometimes we have a hard time reserving rooms, so that's why we end up in 241, which is the nicer room, the bigger one.

sometimes in 235 and then eventually sometimes in here.

Who's our competition?

Like who's pushing us out of the room?

Oh, it's just across the hall.

Okay, thank you all.

That was pretty painless for trying to get six people on the same page.

More than that really with the Assessor's Office.

We just have a couple of other items.

One is Pete had flagged for us that we have a preference.

We can express a preference about how we'd like to receive our appeal packets.

Pete's office does a big, it's a heavy lift to gather all this stuff, particularly the commercial things and put them in tabs and have them available in binders for us on the day of.

Those are convenient for taking notes on, but we're not, I hope, going to be doing too much of that now.

Do we all have to vote the same way, Pete?

No, I don't think so.

I mean, we can

That's my question for you.

I think it's good.

I mean, I would like to have that paper copy in front of me during the board meeting.

So certainly I understand if you would want that.

So that's my question though.

Do you want it in advance and you want the paper copy so that you can refer to it during the meeting?

I can handle that a little better probably.

Being brand new,

Is it your expectation that we will have gone through those materials before the meeting?

Seems like it would be a heck of a lot to shuffle through for the first time at a meeting.

So you would try to get it out to us a few days or a week ahead of a meeting.

Is that the idea?

That's exactly right.

So my policy is to get at least a week in advance to get that information to you, unless for some reason something happens and I'm held up, but typically at least a week in advance.

So you can just look through the information digitally, and then I'll have the paper copies in front of you for you to kind of...

No, you do not.

You do not.

Yes.

Okay.

I will then throw in with everyone else and we'll use a paper copy as well.

A couple of things on that, Frank, that just your comment reminded me of is the folks who are appealing will not necessarily observe the sort of convention to submit everything ahead of time.

They may come with something different.

In fact, they often do.

So you just have to be a little bit

and then some of the commercial submissions are fairly inscrutable.

I try to go through and kind of make sure I understand like the big arguments but

Yeah, so what I learned on it is that a lot of times they're not necessarily arguing over the

The data they're arguing over like the assumptions that underlay the model and that gets like particularly hard to pull from the written submissions and a lot of times it only becomes clear to me during the meeting so being prepared is good.

And just so you know, I think our policy is that if the submission from the applicant is more than three pages, or is it three pages or more, they have to provide all the copies for the board members.

So we don't make those copies ourselves.

Peter?

I'm trying to remember, didn't last year, if you had the information available

for us ahead of time and we were here, you gave us the notebooks then.

I would give you the notebook, let's say like these days where we have it on Tuesday and Thursday or whatever days during the same week, I would give you during, if I had it available and two days ahead, I would definitely have it available.

I would give it to you when you're done with the one day's hearing so you'd have it for the next one, you'd be able to look at the paper copies.

in advance of that one.

I'd hate to bring up one more substantive

Item, but while we've got our attorney here, is there any concern with us giving what I would call like a one-pager of like an overview of like the types of things that we are allowed to vote yes on and just say, hey, this isn't part of the application, but the board asked the assessor's office to send this out with the scheduling of the actual appeal.

And the reason I ask is it just kills me when people go through all the effort to show up

make an argument that I couldn't possibly accept because of the way that the appeal process is structured.

And I wondered if just some bullet points about the most frequent stumbles, which are usually like the view from my porch as a power line in it, just something that can't carry.

Is there any concern about doing that?

You know, it's obviously in the end, you're guided by the statutory standards.

But I will say that anything you can do to help your citizens navigate a very strange process is, I think, helpful.

I think it was written in a way that it just says it's guidance.

It's not saying we will definitely do this.

It's saying that we're more likely to consider this.

Yeah, I think it's helpful.

And in fact, I don't know your board's practice, but many governing bodies have similar types of statements, you know, about, you know, tonight's public hearing.

Here's the types of things that will go on.

Here's how the process works.

Here's what, you know, you're expected to do and how you're expected to behave.

I gave you all the comments.

We already did this project.

Well you approved it at the end of last year for this year.

I mean you could certainly approve it again if you'd like to or you can review it and see if there are any changes.

But it's such a good idea.

I completely forgot.

It was such a good idea.

I instructed my staff to email this to applicants, to residential applicants, when we make their hearing, when we set their hearing up with them.

So this is only for residential that this really applies to the, you know, it wasn't for, you know, your tax reps with your commercial properties.

It really applied to those who really aren't sure what to expect.

I guess the only other thing that just popped into my head is do we want to set some type of a policy and

about or talk about the request for extra time.

There are certain groups or ownership groups that always make a request for additional time.

And sometimes we grant that, sometimes not.

We did last year allow some people some extra time.

Some, yes.

Yeah, I would recommend that you continue to do it on a case by case basis.

Then you can consider it because they emailed that request to me and then I'll bring it to a meeting so you can determine.

Yeah, I think actually the request was instead of half an hour, like five hours last year.

So, but you gave, I think an hour or something like that.

So yeah, I believe

Do they have to make that request in writing in advance?

Yes.

And that's part of the rules of procedure, I believe.

So they can't do it midstream, ask for extra time?

That is correct.

It's one thing that we try to be sort of firm about because people will come and sit and be there for the next one.

And a lot of times they're taking off of work or something else.

Okay, that's all I've got.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, all in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

All right, this meeting is adjourned at 10 29 a.m.