Announcements

April 01, 2021

February marked the completion of my first year as Chief Appraiser over the Denton Central Appraisal District. Oh and what a year! As most of you know by now, I came in at the worst time or the best time depending on if you are a glass half full or half empty type of person. When I became Chief, the District had already started feeling the loss of so many tenured employees retiring, and we were working with an incomplete beta software system that left us with very few options heading into the 2020 Protest Season.

As soon as I was named Chief, I hit the ground running and began hiring a new and enthusiastic team with a heart for serving. We quickly realized the new system would not be able to keep up with the demands that a District our size required, but could not switch systems mid-protest. In July of 2020, we went out for bid on a new software company and ended up going back to the software company the District had used for the prior 10+ years. After we finally certified (limping past the finish line, beat up and bruised) we began the process of converting back to our original software. Getting back those prior years was easy, but converting the flawed 2020 data was anything but easy.

The original conversion time was estimated to be four weeks, but the data was so inaccurate and cryptic that it instead took the software company four months. Four months in our industry might as well have been a lifetime. Our software finally came back on line in January of 2021, but the issues did not stop there. As hard as the software company tried, they could not transfer all the data back over in its original form. So now our staff (who were already four months behind) are having to go in and manually calculate roughly 480,000 accounts in Denton County, while looking for errors and making corrections. They are redoing thousands of sketches that got deleted, rebuilding tables and schedules that could not be converted, and redoing exemptions that got left off in the transfer. The list is endless.

I tell you all that to say, 2021 is not going to be an easy year for the Denton Central Appraisal District. It will be bumpy and we will be behind schedule. In the last 15 months, we have hired 45 temp employees, 22 full time employees and promoted 10 employees. We have hired database administrators, software programmers and we are contracting with a company that specializes in cleaning up data. Every employee is working a minimum 50 hour week, exempt employees are working 60-70 hour weeks. Things will get done and will get cleaned up, but we still have some challenges to overcome.

Rest assured, there are encouraging aspects to the 2021 protest season and beyond. In the last year, we have created a whole new website that will stay updated and is more user friendly than ever before (it launches next week). We have improved our phone system and our online appeal system. We will be back on a trusted and reputable software system for 2021 entry and appraisal. After being with this District for over 20 years, I can say the best part is that we now have the friendliest and most service-oriented team of employees that we have ever had.

This message is not intended to worry anyone. I believe in transparency and communication, and I just want everyone to be aware of what our year ahead looks like for this District. We have a hard working staff whose only goal is to provide a better service to the Denton County property owners and entities. We will continue to work towards that goal until it is achieved.