 Call this meeting out of recess, we have two cases to go tonight. We have the Wilner Appeal and the Jacobs Appeals, and I've been told that in both cases the taxpayers do not expect to be here, so we're ready to go. Do you want to start with Wilner and Rosie, do you want to? This was a house on Terror Street that had sold recently, and the appellant was making a couple of different arguments, and so one argument that they were making was that houses that have sold recently are being unfairly penalized compared to other houses because the sale price is being taken into account, which makes it inequitable when you look at how much the price, the valuations increased since last time around, and we decided to not look at that argument about comparing the percentage increase from last time around because we didn't feel that we should look at whether last time's valuations were fair. So we didn't look at that, but what we did look at was the argument around condition. The assessment had indicated that this property was in very good condition, and the appellant was arguing that even new houses don't necessarily have that rating for condition, and they pointed out a number of things about their property that made it not in good condition. And then they were also arguing, making an equity argument because there were a number of other properties in their neighborhood that they felt were very similar and were assessed lower. So we did the site visit, and we did note that there were a number of cosmetic flaws around the property. Structurally everything seemed fine, but there were enlisted in the report a number of cosmetic things that we noted that probably didn't align with a very good, and so we decided to discount it from very good to good very good, which is the next tick down, and that brought the valuation, if we did that, down to 40, sorry, exactly, 410-900. So we looked at that, and then we compared that on a per square foot basis to two other properties, which actually both the assessor and the appellant had pulled as comparable. So we focused on those two, and felt that the condition of this property was still higher than those other two properties, so taking all that into consideration, we felt good lowering the valuation slightly based on condition, and then went compared to the other properties that that was inequitable. Do you have any questions? Tim. Yes, so was one of the two properties the house next door? I think that the house next door was included on one of the lists, but that is not, oh no, 60 terrace, yes. Because it did seem like a big difference because it kind of twins the house next door. Yeah, and we didn't go into the house next door. We didn't do a site visit of any other comparables. We just looked at the property cards, so we took the property card conditions of the other properties at face value, but yeah, that one and then one just down to 41 terrace, which was pretty similar as well. So there wasn't a basement under the garage, but there was a basement that was finished. That's finished under the main. And it was pretty recently finished, I think. Yeah, and we thought that that's where the condition came from, because the parts that had the basement and then the bathroom that had recently been redone were basically in like new condition, but the rest of it wasn't. Okay. I was just going to say, I can't, I wasn't here to hear the evidence. Oh, thank you. Great, great. Well, I think everybody else was here from Jacobs. Sarah wasn't. Okay. Well, that looks consistent. Oh, and just while you're doing that the members of the board who are here remotely, is it just... Oh, right. Introduce yourselves for the record. Go stop. Okay. It's all in the report. I'm going to try to do sound from here. What's that? Donna gave me a thumbs up. She can hear. Oh, okay. And Jude, can you hear now? So, Jude and Donna, would you please introduce yourselves? It's impossible. Just try to break it off. Okay. Just introduce yourself, because when we have people at a public body, members of the public body who are participating remotely, that's one of the rules. So just say who you are. Jack, you need to move your papers away from the speaker. You're bubbly-ass. Here's all the papers. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. Jude and Donna, would you please state your names? Jude Newman. Great. Thank you. Now, should Rosie go over the report again? No. I can hear Rosie, but I couldn't hear anyone else. Weird. Okay. Well, good. She's the person you needed to hear for this part of it. So the chair would entertain a motion to support the committee's report. Any discussions? All those in favor, signified by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. We've adopted that report. And I don't have it in front of me now because I scrolled. Who did not vote on that one? Mary. Yes, you were here. Great. Okay. So that's done. And we can move on to the Jacob's properties. I'll present that because I wrote the report. And Donna and Jude, can you hear me? Okay. Good. This was the appeal that you all may remember from early in the process, and it is a lot of different properties. And for the record, I think I'll list all the properties that we're taking out. Owned by Overlake Park, LLC. We have five to seven state street, 15 Berry Street, 28 Main Street, 41 to 45 State Street, 49 Greenwood Terrace, 54 Main Street, 58 State Street, 83 East State Street, 96 to 98 Berry Street, 104 Berry Street, and 139 Main Street. For Jailhouse Common Associates Two, we have two to four Spring Street. For Ajax Moving and Storage, LLC, we have 44 to 50 Main Street. For Big Fish, LLC, we have 70 Main Street. For Interstate Enterprises, LLC, we have four Langdon Street. For James Olson Holdings, LLC, we have two to four Monsignor Crosby Avenue and 99 to 101 East State Street. And for City Line Realty, LLC, we have 100 to 110 Main Street. And the issue in all of these cases was the same, which means that the assessor, you remember the assessor last year as part of the process, sent a survey out to all the commercial property owners in the city to find out to get their income and expenses for their properties. And a large percentage, 65% or something like that of the people who got the survey responded. Based on that information, the assessor constructed a formula of income and expenses to be imputed to all of the commercial property owners. And the complaint that the property owners in these cases were making was that the assessor should have used their actual income and expenses rather than the standard set of figures for income and expenses that the assessor was using. And the report suggests that the assessor was right that the taxpayer was not correct because for a couple of reasons. One, if we allow one property owner, one set of property owners to proceed based on their actual income and expenses, then in fairness, all the other property owners in the city should be able to have their taxes, their assessment computed in that way for the income method. Second, doing it the way the property owner is requesting has the possibility of putting distortions into the process because if you have someone, a full landlord who's particularly bad at running their property, then they could get a lower assessment because their incomes might be too low or their expenses might be too high. And so they would be getting rewarded for being not good at what they do and a particularly efficient landlord would actually get penalized by being able to manage their properties at a better ratio of income to expenses. And I remember with one of the property owners where the appeal was withdrawn, a big part of the argument was, well, look, my properties run down. Nothing's been done to the property in 20 years. The building is almost completely vacant, so I deserve a break for that. And it doesn't seem like a sensible way to do it. Beyond that, the comparable sales and the equity comparables also really support the values that the assessor came up with. So for those reasons, we concluded that we should support the assessor's judgment in all of these properties. Olsen and City Line realty holdings were the ones that they withdrew at the meeting and didn't have an issue. Okay. Okay. Sal. It's on the final report that I generate. Yeah. I think it was said before I did a little bit of editing, including putting all those lists. Okay. So I noticed in the report you mentioned that the equity and sales data maybe even indicated that these were under assessed. And I wondered if the committee considered increasing the assessments because of that. We didn't. And we simply didn't talk about it. But again, I think that since we're mainly going by income method for the commercial properties, I think it's reasonable to accept the assessor's judgment that the income method is what gets us to these property values. I thought your rationale for maintaining the income method and not rewarding inefficient property owners made sense. It made me think in this particular case that this property owner has many properties and based on their arguments that many of the buildings were unrented or only partially rented, that feels like inefficient operation. And because of the large number of properties they own, I wonder if actually they're bringing down that formula for everybody and whether sales data should be taken more into consideration because of that situation in Montpelier. Yeah. That's a real interesting point, actually. I've had conversations with at least one council member who thought, well, you know, we should do something about landlords who keep their properties vacant. And why should they? There should be some incentive that the city creates to get property into productive use. Well, it's sort of a weird situation. I mean, aside from the negative impacts on the city itself of having all these vacant properties, it does sort of seem like it could be bringing down the city's overall tax revenue from commercial properties. The vacancies on these particular properties were restaurants, which were brought about by COVID, which are now actually rented out. Okay. I mean, on each one of these properties, the high vacancy rates are accounted for and they're adjusted in the assessment. Once they become rented out, that negative adjustment will be taken away. Wait, they get a discount because they're un-rented? For high vacancy rates, they do have a discount. They have an adjustment to the value. That seems so. They're already getting a break based on their lower actual income. Correct. Okay. Why would we do that? Because their argument is that it was vacant for so long, their expenses are higher, they were having a hard time renting it out. Both of the properties are now, one is currently rented, the other is almost filled. So the argument is that the fact that it wasn't able to be rented out for a long period of time is reflected or reflects a lower fair market value. Correct. Is that a city policy or is that how the state reflects it? It's an appraisal standard. It's not really, the city has nothing to do with it. It's an appraisal practice or assessment practice, I should say. Mary. So this is a really interesting conversation. I'm curious if the standard that talks about a good faith practice to rent or to something, in the future, that there could be a standard for, you're trying to do something and we understand that or the market conditions, I don't know how you would get a non-subjective way of doing that. We certainly know of one or two properties that are not, don't know if they're this property owner's properties that have sat vacant for years. And it's a little bit hard to imagine that they're vacant because there's no demand as opposed to just a desire to leave the vacant. I mean I think the policy lever there is a vacancy tax that is tied to the overall vacancy rate for that particular type of property and that would take into account what you're talking about. But I'm really curious to hear that the assessing already gives folks a break for having a vacant property that there's several different ways to adjust it. Some of these properties also have issues with parking so there can be a negative adjustment made for a lack of parking. Some of these properties actually did receive a lower assessment because of the lack of parking. And I'm sure some of you may have that too, I'm not sure without looking at them. It's like 26 million right beside their 28 million, kind of looking at those two assessments. It didn't feel like we felt like 28, 30 was really long. He did that adjustment, I'm not sure. And then, well granted, like looking at 139 main, which that must be the funeral parlor, right? It is. Yeah. That's been sitting vacant for many years. They brought that into their testimony that because it was vacant we should lower the valuation. They've got a very big condition of adjustment on that one to make up for it. But in particular it's not a vacancy adjustment, it's a condition adjustment because it's not, I mean it's down to the studs. But even before the flood. I haven't been into that building but I've thought when Legal Aid was looking at moving from 7th Court Street to where we are now, we looked at that space and people were kind of shaking as they walked away from it. It still has the elevator to bring the cask, it's up to the first floor. That's what you see, that's a plus. The laboratory in the basement? Uh-huh. So if there are no other questions, the chair would entertain a motion. Would they accept the committee's report? Is there a second? Any further discussion? Right. Kim, you're accusing yourself from this one. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? That is the last assessment appeal and at this point I believe I can say we are a jerk.