 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name is Adam Payne, County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Roger Distruti. And as you know, every month we strive to focus on a different department and share some of the roles and responsibilities of county government. And today, we're very pleased to have with us Laura Heading-Lorenz, our county treasurer and real property lister. Laura, welcome. Thank you for having me. Now we put together, of course, our questions ahead of time, and generally the department head will, you know, suggest what would be a good area to touch on, and we refine them. In the first line Laura wrote, hardly a day ever goes by that I don't think about property taxes. And when I first read that, I thought, oh, you poor lady, who wants to think of property taxes every day? But of course, Laura works in the area of tax bills and implementing our property tax system, and she and her staff do a tremendous job, and it's a very important job, because of course that funds all the very important programs and services that Sheboygan County provides, along with, of course, state and federal dollars. Laura, let's start with just sharing a little bit about yourself. When were you elected county treasurer? And what are the roles and responsibilities of being a county treasurer? Well I was, I took the oath of office in January of 2003, and we're quite a busy office with regard to the public. So our office consists of a very cyclical functionality, where we start with real property listing, and we move into assessing and taxation, and then ultimately there's a tax bill that comes out of it. And that's really a high end overview of our office, but we do a lot of other things. Like I mentioned, we try to take the very best care we can of the public. We interact with them every day. We also work with our assessors, our local units of government, and internal departments every single day. We take care of all of the banking for the county. Other things that happen in our office that people do see on a regular basis would be tax collection, which you mentioned. And during the first installment, tax collection, our office's main role is to support our local municipalities because they are calling us almost every day with questions and issues and how do we do this and, you know, what would you do in this situation? So we help them out that way. During second installment, and that would be June and July, we collect all of those taxes. And well then we're seeing a lot of people from the public at that time. And all year round we collect delinquent taxes, and then ultimately if they go too far delinquent we would commence tax foreclosure. And I mentioned we do the real property listing. And one other function that I have would be to sit on the land information board as a member. Okay. I'm going to roll it back just for a second, and I'm fighting a little bit of a cold here. When were you first elected county treasurer? In November of 2002, and I took the oath of office in January of 03. Of 03? I cannot believe it's already been 15, 16 years. Wow, has that gone by quickly? And prior to that you worked for a while in the county finance department and left for the private sector and then returned to run for a county treasurer, and it's been 15 years as our county treasurer. It doesn't seem possible how the time has flown. So then when would you be up for your next election? That would be this year. This year? This November? Yes. Yeah, well very good. It's been 15 years. You've got quite a track record. How many staff do you work with? Well we have, including myself, we have eight people right now in our office and there's, even though everybody is virtually cross-trained and can help the public do pretty much anything that is needed from them, we have two folks that specialize in real property listing and we have one person that's in our office temporarily working on some land information related work and then the rest of the folks deal with the accounting. You've got some new faces in the office. We do. Yeah, I've had the pleasure to interact with some of them of late and some really good people. So obviously the property tax bill is something that is on the mind of some of our viewers I imagine because the first installment, they were due what, January 31st? That is correct. And I made that first installment payment and I've got my second one ahead of me yet and that is due what July 31st, right? So the first installment, of course, everyone's going to their municipalities or their banks in certain areas to pay, the second installment the county collects. One of the things I've really noticed as an improvement you've made is when I started 17 years ago, there were long lines, people waiting to pay their first installment and I never see those long lines anymore. What changed and when did that happen? Well about three years ago, actually more than that, probably five years ago or more, our municipalities all started collecting their taxes on their own. Most of them were already doing that. We were collecting a few at the county administration building during December and January. But then all of our municipalities started collecting their own and of course many banks started helping assisting the municipalities do their collections. That's been really a nice component to all of the collections because many of our banks have some lobby hours on Friday a little bit later than we normally would and on Saturday mornings. So it helps everybody to, if they want to, pay in person to do so and it adds a little extra convenience to the whole process. Rather than everyone having to drive into the city of Sheboygan, they can go to their local bank or municipality and diversifies it so chances are they're not waiting very long in line. I thought that was a great move on your part. What's the primary mission of the treasurer's office? I mean you just gave a high-end snapshot a few minutes ago with some of the work but what do you see as the primary mission, the primary area of responsibility? Well, our primary mission and our mission statement is to service all of the public and local units of government in the most friendly, efficient and effective manner possible and provide meaningful property listing, taxation and assessing information to those people. And you mentioned you have eight staff, you have the property tax responsibilities, you have the real property listing responsibilities. What's your total budget to support your department and your functions? For 2016 it's just over $600,000. And then finally, before I turn it over to Roger, you have a beautiful, beautiful display of our 2015 plat book and I know you have a role in pulling this together and our planning and conservation department and a couple others provided as well but it's just, it's really an eye-catching photo. How do folks get this plat book? How is it put together? What's the role of your department? Well, we do a lot of the proofing on the book. So the front end of the book is proofed by us. Everybody takes a section that's on the land information board, planning and conservation. They're looking over the maps at Harvey, our surveyor, county surveyors looking over the maps. The indexes are checked. And just basically we have sections in the plat book that have all of our 4-H clubs, all of our county board supervisors, all of our county governments, how to contact them. So it really, really is even a little bit nicer than just a plat book because we have roadmaps in there, lake maps with depths for those who are interested in fishing or scuba diving or scuba diving, all those types of things. So where can you get them? Well the cost is $30 and that includes sales tax and again we've tried to make it more convenient for people who aren't right in the city of Sheboygan so you could go to Adele to the National Exchange Bank and trust there. They have the atlases in Plymouth on Eastern Avenue, the Bank First National right across from Quicktrip. They sell them, our county museum on Erie Avenue has them and the UW extension right here on the grounds of UW Sheboygan, they sell them as well. And of course we have them at the administration building and our office, county clerk, register of deeds and the planning and conservation department all sell them. It's really improved over the years, I've been impressed with just the level of detail and how much more value it provides so my compliments to you and all the departments involved. Roger. Great to have you with us today Laura and your primary responsibility is obviously collecting the taxes but before you do you need to give the various tax credits on the bills and what are the different types of tax credits that are applied on people's bills before they have to pay the bottom line? Well there are three different types of credits. There is the state school tax credit, there's the first dollar credit and then many people should be familiar with the lottery and gaming credit. So there's three of them. And you do have to certify for the lottery and gaming credit and how is that done? That's a very long process, it takes us pretty much the year to go through the database. Let me give you a little history on that. When I first came into office in 2003 we were required by state law at that time, of course the laws changed but at that time we had to wipe out our entire database, clear it out, send about 50-some-thousand postcards out to every property owner in the county. They had to tell us whether they were eligible for the lottery credit. If they were then we had to enter and actually our IT department was doing a lot of keying for us but they were entering all of those postcards that came back. So that was a very, very long and drawn out process and we had to do that once every five years. That wasn't real efficient and you can imagine in a five-year period people buy and sell homes so lottery credits weren't being truly kept up to date. What we do now is we never, ever, ever clear out that database. We do constant updates to it. So annually the state has to certify our database and then once a year the very ending product is a file, electronic file that goes to the state and then they check it over and they decide whether they're going to audit us or not based on how good our data is. So we basically do the same thing on our end. Jane Dragon, the Chief Deputy County Treasurer, has written a database and she dumps all of our information in there, sorts it out, gets some really cool reports for our municipalities who help us and all year long all of our municipalities help us go through all of this data and they tell us whether we should be adding or deleting lotteries and that's how it happens. But we have a lot of help from our local municipalities. And if someone didn't get that credit on their 2015 bill and they feel they should have what should they do or what's the process to check if they should have gotten one. So because we're after the fact, the bills have already been sent out, the collection time is over with, if they do notice that and they think, well gosh I should have gotten a lottery credit or we sent them a letter and they never got back to us, well there's a process for a late claim lottery credit. So all they have to do is call our office and we'll ask them a few questions and then we will either email them a form or we can also give them a link to the state's website where they can fill it in themselves as well and print it out. And what is the average lottery credit just so folks have a feel for that? Well the lottery credits depend upon your school district. So they ranged for 2015 it ranged from $88 to $124. Okay, so it's real money? It is. So that's adding up quite a bit but what would be the total that's received by entire township, excuse me, county taxpayers? Usually it's in the, well we will get that money from the state eventually for the lottery and gaming credit. That's one of our settlements we do during the year. I believe it's around $5 to $6 million annually and then we disperse that to the municipalities. So that is real money also. And there's also the school tax credit and the first dollar tax credit on your bill, how does a taxpayer qualify for that? Well those are much simpler to handle. The school tax credit is all calculated by the state of Wisconsin, Department of Revenue and they do their calculations and again that is by school district and then they provide us with those numbers per school district, the dollars per school district. So we enter that information into our tax tables and it does all of the calculating automatically. And the beauty of it is every tax bill gets a school tax credit. Now the first dollar credit is a little bit different. The first dollar credit is our newest credit. It started in 2009 and it started out with an appropriation of $15 million that came from the Department of Transportation to specifically help people reduce their property taxes. So although it's similar to the lottery and gaming credit, people don't have to do anything to qualify for it. If you have a building on your property, we call it an improvement. So if you have any type of improvement on your property, you will automatically qualify for the first dollar credit because our computers know that, that's smart. So we don't have to do anything. We just have to put information into tables and it will be calculated automatically. Well, thank you again for all the work that you and your staff do for Sheboygan County. You're welcome. As you know, over the last 15 years that you've been collecting property taxes, it really hasn't gone up dramatically because the county board has really held the line with how much property taxes have been collected. For a period of time there we reduced, the county board reduced property taxes I think four out of six years and then it was five out of eight or I don't know what anymore. But the last 10 years on average with the ups and downs, it's been less than 1% a year and that's gotten to be even more challenging of late. Ten years ago the board was emphasizing we need to hold property taxes in line. Now the state has the one size fits all cap unless it's net new construction. Where I'm going with this is, as you know, Laura and every department head and every county board supervisor knows, we have to get more innovative, we have to be working smarter, we've had to gain efficiencies, we've had to streamline, we've had to reduce programs and services. In fact, 17 years ago we had 1,350 employees and today we have 810. 25 years ago we had what 35 departments and today we have 19. So we've done a lot of cost saving initiatives and I know that you've done some initiatives in your office as well to streamline or become more efficient. Sure a little bit with our viewers what you've done to be part of the solution and gain efficiencies and provide better service from your department. Well we've taken on the real property listing, it's been a very nice fit for our office but that consolidated that group of people and was across savings to the county. And that was January 1st of 2009 that that started. And then by April of 2009, I'm sorry, April of 2010, correct myself, we took on the real property listing for the city of Sheboygan and that helped them do some streamlining and cost savings. And what that meant at that point in time is that all of the real property listing was being done in one area, in a central area. So I think that was helpful to our taxpayers that there was one, we're almost a one stop shop now for folks that have questions with regard to their property. And moving forward, I know you've been talking a lot about improving your computer systems and your software systems. Please touch on that a little bit. Yes, we're almost at the point of making a decision on a new software vendor. We have, we've been going through questions and answers back and forth after our RF peer request for proposals have gone out. And we will be implementing new software this year. So that means migrating everything out of the current system we have and getting it put into a new system. We're excited about it. We are, one of the streamlining mechanisms of all of this is that we have the ability for the very first time, instead of having two tax systems, one at the county level and one at the municipal level, we will be able to have the county and all of our towns, villages and cities utilize one system. So that will be really nice, not just for us internally, but also for our taxpayers because they'll be able to go to our website and be able to see instantaneously whether they have had a payment made or not. And any other changes you've made in the office, improvements you've made, anything else you'd like to touch on? Well, we've had a lot of changes in our team members and our staffing. We had several, and we're a small department, like I said, eight. So we had several people retiring last year. And so we have a very new group of people. So last year, Jane Dragon was doing a lot of education in our office. I don't know how she did it, but she did do it, and she made it through with flying colors. And so everybody has almost gone through a whole cycle in our office now. Which is about what it takes if you're really going to learn the full breadth of responsibilities. Yes. So you've got some good people. How about long-term goals? What are some of the long-term goals you have for the department? Yeah. Well, we would like to see more of our land information on the internet, available maps and things like that available to the taxpayers. So little by little, we're working with our IT department, an exciting thing to work with them. So we're just trying to get more and more information available electronically for folks. We have information we want to publish internally on our intranet to make that a little bit easier for folks to gather data that's shared between perhaps several departments. So we're looking at those things. We dream of having connections with other softwares in the county. So we're going to add, after we get our software going up and running in 2016, in 2017, we're going to be working on some integrations. Okay, very good. We only have a few minutes remaining, but I know another area that you and your staff spend time on, and it's very important, is the foreclosure process. And fortunately, it seems like foreclosures are on the decline a little bit now that the economy's picked up, but for a while there, it was going the other way around. Could you just briefly touch on the foreclosure process and that if a home is foreclosed on, how does a viewer check in and learn about that and maybe want to purchase a home that's been foreclosed? Well, we have a sale going on right now, Adam, now that you've mentioned it. We have 15 properties for sale. So they can go on to our internet site, the county's website, which is www.cheboykingcounty.com. They can click on departments and go to treasure and real property listing. And then we have a link for tax foreclosed property. And we have the listing of the properties out there. And we have information on how do you bid on a property, what is the process. We have all of that on our internet site, and it was just recently updated. So if anybody's interested, they can go to that site. The process in and of itself, after property has backed taxes for three years, we start the process. But it's a collaborative effort at the county. We are working with our corporation council and we're working with external businesses to take care of the whole process. But it's through the courts and it's a very legal and in some respects a very tedious process, but in the end we've done everything we can to try to help people not to take their properties, which is our main concern. And that's what I've always really appreciated about your approach, Laura. I know that you really try to make sure that some folks are hurting and trying to keep their home, that we work with them, that obviously you have to collect taxes and we have legal parameters we have to work with them, but between you and the finance committee there's that balance of sensitivity of trying to help people be successful and get back on their feet and keep their home if they can. And if not, well then ultimately we have to go through the legal proceedings, as you said, and hopefully get someone to move back into that home and improve it and have it become a vibrant household again rather than a place with a yellow sign in front of it and no one's home. So I appreciate how you handle that. Thank you. Thank you for this overview. We appreciate you being here today. We appreciate you joining us today. If you have any questions about what you learned today about our county treasurer's office, please don't hesitate to contact Laura or one of her staff. Go to the website. If you're not certain how to call or get involved, go to our county clerk's office and they'll direct you in the right place. But again, Laura, thanks for joining us. Thank you. And thank you. Next month, the gentleman to my left, you're right, Roger Destruity is going to be the guest. Yes, he's going to be in the hot seat. We're going to talk about the last four years that Roger has been the county board chairman and all the things he did well. So please join us next month because a lot has been happening in Sheboygan County. A lot of innovations, whether it's the county treasurer's office or one of the other 18 departments. And we're going to talk a little bit about look back with the county board chairman, Roger Destruity. Until then, thanks for joining us and we'll see you next month.