Tax bills coming in mid-December

EPHRATA — After struggling mightily with difficult and buggy software, the Grant County Assessor’s Office expects to mail out 40,0000 tax bills to property owners by mid-December.

“It has been a year of fighting with software,” said Assessor Melissa McKnight, who said her office has been struggling to get Thompson Reuters’ TerraScan mapping and tax assessment software to work properly.

“There was a depreciation issue in the software,” McKnight said. “We found the problem, and we let them know. And we’ve been meeting with them weekly.”

The assessor had hoped to mail out tax bills on Dec. 5, but issues with the printer will delay that mailing to Dec. 12, McKnight said.

Grant County is divided into six regions for assessment purposes, and McKnight said her office will go through and reappraise one region each year. The remaining regions go through what McKnight called a “market re-evaluation,” and the mapping software failed to do that properly this year.

The software would take two similar houses in the same neighborhood and derive vastly different values for them, creating a number of inaccurate assessments.

“It took two months to fix those calculations, and then we had to restart the analysis for the market adjustments,” she said.

Thompson Reuters had not responded by press time to requests for comments on problems with its TerraScan software.

McKnight said the assessor’s office has been dealing with computer problems for much of the last year.

“We were down more than we were up,” she said. “So last year we got a new server, and that was supposed to be the answer to all our problems. We were down for three weeks after that.”

McKnight said her office is considering alternatives to TerraScan, but a bid to “see what else is out there” sits on the county commissioners’ desks, waiting to be acted upon.