State legislation aimed at providing property tax relief to home and business owners also will shrink local government.
Indiana House Bill 1001, passed in March, includes the transfer of the duties of township assessors in townships of less than 15,000 parcels to the county assessor's office. Kosciusko County Assessor Laurie Renier told the County Commissioners Tuesday that all of the county's township trustee assessors will lose their assessing duties July 1.Plain, Tippecanoe, Turkey Creek and Wayne townships each have an elected township assessor instead of a trustee assessor. HB 1001 allows those assessors to keep their positions until the end of their terms in 2010. Trustee assessors will keep their trustee duties.
Prairie Township Trustee Assessor Julia Goon said the change is going to cost county property owners customer service.
"I feel like taxpayers in this county will not be taken care of as well," Goon said.
Goon said she has assessed property values for 28 years. She works from her home in Prairie Township, and said the familiarity that township trustees have with their townships and their location within their townships helps them provide high-quality assessing service to township residents. She said property owners will have to go to the assessor's office in Warsaw during business hours to question their property assessments. She said some of the Amish residents in her township may have to pay for rides into town to visit the central assessor's office.
"When we make appointments, it's from early morning until late at night," Goon said. "We always are here to service the taxpayers."
Renier said she does not expect the quality of assessing service to suffer.
"It's the very same work, it's just in the county office instead of 17 individual township offices," said Renier. "Everything we have is on our county's GIS site and we're only a phone call away. We've always provided customer service, and we're going to continue to provide customer service. None of that is going to cease."
HB 1001 allows county assessors to hire qualified applicants to assist with assessing duties. Renier said she does not yet have a plan for how many people she will have to hire.
Other counties in the area are working on strategies for the transition. Marshall County Assessor Debra Dunning and Elkhart County Assessor Cathy Searcy both said they have scheduled meetings with all township trustee assessors in their counties to discuss the transition. Dunning and Searcy said they are considering the possibility of contracting personal property assessing work to the former township trustee assessors next year.
"That trustee assessor is already in place in that township. They know those rural farmers," Dunning said. "We don't want to lose personal property assessments. Township assessors keep tabs on that. That's the hometown service that we're going to be lacking now."
Renier said she hopes to have a personal property department in her office. She said personal property assessors could visit townships if needed to complete their work.
