1. Tax system assessment-Eide Bailly

Improve the Special Assessment Process Cass County invests roughly 500 hours a year inputting and managing the special assessments for the Water Resource Districts alone. This doesn't include the time invested by Moore Engineering to create, assess and maintain the Districts. To improve this process, changes could include: J- Graphical relationship between the GIS data, the rules, the parcel, and the improvements. This will help facilitate assessment calculation and provide better insight for the residents if made available over the internet. J- Easily recalculate special assessment liability by parcel, when key inputs change J- Handle both equal annual principal and equal annual total payment J- The ability to integrate Fargo and West Fargo assessments and allow County assessments to be entered and maintained from a single point J- Flag assessments that need to be recalculated by parcel. When a parcel changes, either through a split or any method that would drive the assessment to be changed, flag that assessment for that parcel. If that change has a domino affect on other parcels, flag those as well. Electronic Entry of the Tax Role As noted in one of the observations above, there are 75 jurisdictions outside of Fargo and West Fargo that are responsible for the recording of taxes on 5700 residential properties. Roughly 25% of these jurisdictions are responsible for 75% of the properties. Outside of Fargo and West Fargo, there are a large percentage of properties that are being inefficiently being maintained by a few assessors. To improve this situation: J- Require Assessors for large cities and townships (greater than 90 parcels) to enter their data electronically J- Provide local Assessor a secure area they can log in to and have the ability to update the parcel information they're responsible for. If necessary, the updates could be saved in an "in process" status until approved by the County By requiring 19 of the 75 jurisdictions to electronically submit their tax information, the County can decrease the manual-handling of nearly 4300 of the 5700 parcels each year. The Cities of Fargo and West Fargo use the same software application for taxes and assessments. In addition, th~ City of Fargo is making substantial improvements to this software application that will address many of the gaps and requirements mentioned in this report. Possibly the most effective approach would be to have Cass County and the City of Fargo partner in building a single tax processing applications. If a common tax application could be used between the County and the two largest cities in the County, it could: J- Greatly lower costs to for both the County and the City through cost sharing J- Improve the information available to the residents J- Increase the efficiency related to the data moving between entities. Cass County Tax Automation Assessment & Recommendation Page 11 05/05/2006 Proprietary and Conjidmtialo Contents of this document can not be rprorbtced wi/hollt written permission from Eide Bailfy. IJ....P and CaJJ County ND