By Tom Grace
Cooperstown News Bureau
November 08, 2008 04:00 am COOPERSTOWN _ After about a year of study, Otsego County's Real Property Tax Office has presented the county board with a study on assessing options. One option would be to have the county take over assessing from the towns, a change that would require a referendum but provide uniformity. Alternatively, for a fee, towns could contract with the county to provide various assessing services. At Wednesday's board meeting, Real Property Tax Director Steve Child told representatives that towns are finding it harder to keep assessors, noting Otego and Unadilla had not found assessor candidates in last week's election. The job is demanding and can be contentious when municipalities are going through revaluations. Revaluations are considered necessary to keep property values consistent from town to town, especially in school districts, which may comprise many towns. ``One thing we definitely could do for the towns is take over the revals,'' Child said. ``It would save them a lot of money and be better than someone just coming in, blasting through a town and leaving.'' Often after a revaluation, some property owners are upset, and assessors and their boards of review have to pore over values and make sure they're fair, he said. If the central office in Cooperstown, which already maintains a county-wide database, took over this job, it could work more closely with local officials throughout the process. The ``Centralized Property Tax Administration Assessment Study for Otsego County'' was paid for by the state. ``They paid us $25,000 to do the study and $25,000 to present it to the county board,'' Child said. The report was prepared by Hank Schecher, who works in the Real Property Tax Office, and Schecher joined Child for the presentation Wednesday. Later, the board voted to accept the second $25,000 grant, which comes with no requirement to implement suggestions, only to look at the problems. In other business Wednesday, the board: ä Went into lengthy executive sessions twice, once with its labor attorney, John Corcoran of Syracuse. The county is in a standoff with its CSEA employees in Unit 8100, who have been working without a new contract for 22 months. According to both sides, the issues are salary increases and health insurance costs, and a state Public Employment Relations Board fact-finder is preparing an outside assessment of the issues. ä Approved moving the position of GIS coordinator, which pays $42,846 a year, from the Information Technologies Department to the Real Property Tax Office. ä Approved a resolution ``in support of increased freight rail hauling capacity,'' an initiative that comes from the railroad industry's ``Go 21'' (Growth Options for the 21st Century) organization. The resolution calls for more federal money for be put into railroads and ``opposes any effort to re-regulate freight railroads.''
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