Board of Review - Regular Meeting

The kids came running back to our place. Oh my god. The goats were loose and they were eating the tents. Oh boy, yeah.

I don't know what to do. Billy's loose. I was like, what? They're chewing on the tent.

He's eating the tent. We're all good.

Goats.

Hey, Sue. Hey.

How are you?

Hello. We're all good. So we can get out of here at 7 o'clock.

Can I leave at like 5 too? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay, we're good.

Go ahead. Call the board a review for the City of Altoona order.

Roll call. We have Matthew Buren as the chairman. Present. Dale Stuber.

Here.

Bruce Thielen.

Yep.

Susie Zilmer. Here. Susan Rowe. Here. We have absent Mayor Brendan Bratt and Councilperson Timothy Lima. And we also have Attorney Sambach Hanson and City Clerk Cindy Bauer and Secretary for the Board of Review. And we also have Deputy Clerk Julie Oliver and Megan Bickford, the Assessor for Accurate Appraisal. We have a quorum.

Thank you. First item is to confirm of appropriate Board of Review and open meeting notices.

Yes, I have the affidavit of posting that meeting for the open book and the Board of Review has been posted on April 24th, published on April 24th, and has been on our website ever since. And we have other locations in the library, here at City Hall, and at the post office. And then we also are verifying that Chapter 2.44, Board of Review, has the 2.44.020, the confidentiality of financial information, for a notice of that. And then we also have for confirmation of chairperson and vice chairperson on the confirmation that Matthew Buren and Vice Chairperson Sue Rowe were appointed at the May 28th initial Board of Review meeting. And then the affidavit of training, we have Susan Zillmer, Dale Stuber, myself, Cynthia Bowers-Clark, and Deputy Clerk Julie Oliver all attended a Board of Review training, and that took place on April 18th, 2026. And I also received the assessment role and assessor's affidavit by Assessor Megan Bickford of accurate appraisal. I think that covers it, and we did do the... I did the swearing of the, although that's the next agenda item, number four, swearing in an assessor, but she had already signed the official oath. But I believe all of our paperwork is in order.

Okay, so we took care of the clerk to swear in the assessor. We got that taken care of as well?

Yes, because I did give, Megan did fill it out and gave the oath for that she's the assessor, affirming that she was the assessor for this year for the Board of Review.

And then on the mandatory training requirements, is it every two years?

It's good for every two years. And we have to have one person at least certified every year. So next year, I try and stagger it with all of the three council members so it's every other year. So this way then. But it's nice to have everybody keep their certification. But at least we need at least one every year. All right.

And then let's see if we're conducting board review. Let's see if we don't have any petitioners or anything at this time. So we can go and review the assessment roll, or you have the annual assessment report.

Sure. So this year we did a market revaluation, which is called an interim market update now for the city of Altoona. We saw an average increase for residential property of 11.26%. Commercial change is about 8.36. We did do some reassessment of land values. And so a lot of land seed saw about a 20% increase to their land. We visited 56 parcels, reviewed 1,955 building permits. There was 255 sales, 151 of those were usable. So unusable sales are any sales that are from a parent to a child or upon death transactions. So those are included in usable sales for sales analysis. We had 31 open book appointments. We talked to 100, well, we had 145 interactions with residential. constituents, and I have three copies of all of those notes that you guys could share in your leisure for the two hours we're here. So that's not necessarily 145 people, that's just contacts, so maybe you talked to someone twice. They're divided by assessors, so if you flip through them, the first page is from one assessor, the next page will be from the next assessor. And we talked to 42 commercial. We had 42 commercial interactions. Next year will be a maintenance year, meaning that all values will be rolled over from this year unless there is a change to the property being a building permit or something else like that.

That is all. Very good. And then let's see, so next is review assessment role and statutory duties, examining the role.

There it is. Feel free to examine at your leisure.

Plenty of time to dig through that. And then in here, correcting description or calculation errors.

We had one omitted property value, 18 omitted property values. That was due to an error in not putting the second floor square footage onto some new townhouses. So he has been, Jason Gripenchop has been informed of that value that was missed in 2025. And so he will be paying for it. hopefully be paying for that this year. But no corrections of errors. Great.

And that, let's see, the open book changes are included in the assessment rule.

All open book changes are included in the assessment rule.

Great, thank you. And then on that Otter Tail property, most of the folks on the Board of Review here will remember just that coming up in a meeting within the last few months. Citizen came in there was just kind of wondering about it.

So yeah, it's good to see that that's that's been addressed So thank you for your work on them There's no other questions right now what I'll do is I'll just I don't want dead air on this thing so we'll just pause the tape because I mean it's being recorded and

And then if there's anything... Can I just ask, without going through all of it, can you just kind of summarize? I mean, how many property assessments did you end up adjusting? Like, how many total properties were addressed and how many ended up with an adjustment?

I'm going to pull up a report here.

And I have a second question, too. Sure. The other question had to do with, how do you address the land change in value? Like, how is that done? And what's that based on?

Well, for the land changes, we used vacant land sales. We also used sales with improved properties. So we were seeing sales that were of properties that would maybe be for a smaller ranch or something valued around $400 to $500 a square foot, which tells us that that's not necessarily, that's a little topsy-turvy. And so therefore, some of the value needs to be put on the land because people are wanting to live in Altoona. They don't just necessarily want that building. So we kind of do a comparison of the market around there, and then we're doing kind of a blanket increase for each neighborhood. The most significant neighborhood saw maybe an increase from $2 a square foot up to $6 a square foot. Of the land itself? Of the land itself, yeah. We also put into place some pricing structures so it's more solidified and equitable throughout the community as well. So before we might have had something, well, this one was in gross and this one was over here. And so because the market analysis showed that there needed to be a change in land, we were able to put that structure in to make it even more

I don't say equitable, but I mean because they were equitable before but more standardized if you will okay, I Guess I had some of my Constituents came to me and said that their land value more than doubled and that their neighbor one man who actually bought his land and when the subdivision was being built, all the lots were the same value, and he said, and they're approximately all the same, that now his lot is much, much more, was reassessed and priced much, much more than his neighbors, and the lot is the same. And it wasn't the house. The houses are very different. But they were concerned that their lots were more than doubling the land value, and they don't, Isn't that kind of a lot, I guess is what I'm saying, in one year to have a lot go from, I don't know, $60,000? I don't even know. I can't even throw a price. But I do remember him saying, you know, my lot just went from good to extravagant.

Well, there were some cases that came up where some lots were extravagant. Some lots had a positive influence on it, meaning they were getting assessed maybe 35% higher because they had a view or something like that. And then in that same subdivision, after we did our research, some of the people were getting negative influence because their yard was super steep. So we took away all of those influence. So that's why some people saw a much larger increase and some people didn't. Some people thought maybe, you know, so that was one of those reasons to make things more equitable.

So if they had a hill on their lawn or on their lot, actually all the lots I'm talking about have hills.

On Otter Creek Trail. Hmm? On Otter Creek Trail.

Correct. Yeah.

And that is the area that I am talking about. And so that case happened. Like I said, some had negative influences because their yard was super hilly. Some of them had positive influences because they figured they have a better view. Some people, depending on the assessor, that looked at it over the past few years and the previous assessor and things like that. And so when we did the revaluation this year and saw that the land needed to be adjusted, we looked into those and some of them Didn't see much of an increase because we took that positive evaluation off and some of them saw a much bigger increase because we took the negative influence off so Not only was it negative from the year before it's now positive and equal with everyone else We decided that those with the steep hill wasn't necessarily a gain or a loss, in our opinion, and as the market showed. Because even though you have a steep hill and you can't build on it, you get more privacy, and nobody will ever build behind you. So that's not necessarily a help or a hurt. So we chose to delete all the influences, high, above, or below. And so everybody's equally in that community at $6.25 a square foot, I believe. The one lot that was over an acre, I did put a little influence on, negative influence, because it was much bigger than everyone else's, but probably sold, when it was split up, around the same price. If you want to look at them specifically, we can do that, but currently my internet is not cooperating.

If they have issues, I would encourage them to talk to the assessor.

They have. I'm just curious to know for myself.

Do they know we're doing this tonight?

Yes. They've already inquired. They've already talked with the assessor privately.

Okay.

We ended up reviewing that entire cul-de-sac, and they all got open book changes for their land.

Thank you. Yeah.

I'm going to try to hook up to my... So we changed 112 parcels prior to our open book changes going out, which was on July 27th. I'm trying to pull up what we changed since then, but I'm not having any luck with the internet here.

And I'm going to guess almost all of them were down. Yes. The changes were typically that they were lowered. Correct.

We don't typically... Usually a concerned citizen is aware or brings something up if we need to increase something. As far as I know, nothing was increased in Altoona. Did have a case of a storage unit in a different municipality, but none here. So I'm going to try to connect to my internet. thinking to get to our Wi-Fi. I don't know why. Yeah, I thought it was. I'm unguessed. Just nothing's loading. Oh, sorry.

Thank you.

So we made another 19 changes after the open book period where we had to send waivers out to the people and they had to sign and get back to us saying they consent to the new value or they're aware of the new value. So that's a total of 131 parcels we ended up changing. And that could be from updates to their information or comparing it to the sales analysis, basically.

So you had 19 people come to open book then?

We had 31 people come to open book.

31, okay.

So during the open book period is still before, so basically you have open book, and then about two weeks later we send out our notices, another notice, which is just, so you get the same kind of notice that you already got in the mail, but that just saves us the extra step of having to get the waiver signed by that person. So yeah, so the open book appointments were included in the first 112 notices. So we talked to those people first, and then another 19 approached us after that open book notice went out, and then we had to send the waivers via email. They're printed in the roll book today, so everything's in there. Did I answer questions? Yes. Thank you.

Would you like me to pause the tape then if there's no other discussion? I mean, if there's other things you can think of, I can turn it back on. But in the meantime, we'll just pause it. Bruce, you're good?

I'm good. Yeah. Go ahead and just pause.

Still thinking. Oh, come on. It's still on pause. It's not.

You got to put gas in it, or what?

I don't know. It takes 15 seconds, but it's not going back. It's still showing pause. I don't want to end it, because it's the ending. But oh, there we go. OK. So item seven then.

All right, thank you. Next item, item seven. This is consider or act on scheduling any additional board of review dates.

No need to schedule any additional meeting.

None needed. Okay. Any other comments or anything else? If not, I'll take a motion to adjourn.

Roll move to adjourn at 7 o'clock. Go ahead, Dale. I'll second.

Motion to second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you all again. Good night. Have a great night.