High resolution aerial mapping to help with property tax reassessment

Historically state statute required all Oregon Counties to perform a six-year reappraisal cycle, said Jill Amery of the Wasco County assessment and tax department. “In the 1980s, counties could not maintain Real Market Values, minimum service levels or the mandated six year appraisal cycle, and the property tax system was in jeopardy of disintegration,” Amery explained. Although a state funding mechanism was created in 1989, that mechanism has fallen short, she added.

“Counties still to this day have difficulty performing current reappraisal and valuation work,” Amery reported to the board. This is a statewide issue, and Wasco County is one of the counties having no reappraisal cycle. Instead capturing new construction and changes through building permit issuance.

“I inherited a program that had not performed reappraisal in 20 to 25 years,” she said. In 2017, the department began working on reappraisal of properties on the county’s tax rolls. “It’s a big lift to visit every property in our vast and rural landscape of Wasco County,” Amery said. The county has now hired and trained the staff necessary to perform reappraisals, and new technology like aerial mapping is making site valuations possible from a desktop, she said.

The county approved two rounds of aerial mapping, one in winter when there is no leaf cover, and another in spring or summer that will show plant growth. Once the mapping is completed, later flights will flag changes.

“As we acquire additional flights this application will highlight any improvement footprint changes. This will allow us to capture real market value adjustments real time, with no lag due to physical on-site inspections, lack of access or relying solely upon building permits which are not always acquired for changes,” Amery said.

Reassessments of more than 17,000 real property accounts in Wasco County will take years, but once updated it will be much easier to maintain up to date property records, she added.

In addition to the assessors office, other county departments will also have access to the maps created. For example, public safety will be able to identify ingress and egress on a property and view structures in an oblique view, and public works can view roads at increased resolution to evaluate their condition.

The board approved two flights, the first a winter flight at a cost of $160,378, the second, during the summer two or three years later, at a cost of $146,678.

There will be some public access to the mapping data, but details of that have not yet been worked out, said Tyler Stone, chief administrative officer for the county. “We want to balance what we put out there for the public, and what we want to recover costs on,” he said. “This is very expensive to do, and we want to try to recoup some of those costs. There will be requests from for profit entities for this data, and it’s our data.”

Commissioner Kathy Swartz noted the county has been talking about the project for years, and said she supported both the efficiency of the mapping as a tool and the increase in staff safety as a result of not having to physically visit every tax lot.

Bradley Cross, who serves jointly as surveyor for both Wasco and Hood River counties, told the board that committee work at the state level is in progress, seeking funds for high-resolution aerial photography to be provided at the county level. “We are working to fund some of this through the state, and hopefully we will be seeing more assistance from the state,” he said, possibly in the next budget cycle.