Board of Directors Work Session

850 E Anderson Lane and via videoconference

The public may hear and view this meeting while in progress online at https://traviscad.org/boardmeetings

• Agenda
• Meeting Audio

Transcript

James Valadez 0:00
Good afternoon. I’d like to call the work session, meeting of the Travis Central Appraisal District Board of Directors to order. The time is 12:10 on June 7, 2022. We are conducting this meeting at TCAD headquarters located at 850 East Anderson Lane in Austin, Texas and a quorum is present. We are also continuing to provide this meeting as a zoom call as a courtesy. The first item on our work session agenda is Item three: workshop on district budget preparation and possible direction to staff on budget priorities. The board will not make any final decisions regarding the district budget at this meeting.

Marya Crigler 0:40
Okay, so this is just a presentation of our preliminary budget. To get any feedback from you, we’ve got to approve our preliminary budget by June 15. So we’ve got a deadline we need to make, but this is just a preliminary overview of what we’ve done with the budget. We talked last year, we asked for a pretty large increase, and we agreed to split it over two years. So we’ve asked for half of our staff increase last year we’ll be coming back this year, asking for the remainder of the staff, particularly in clerical divisions where we find we need the most support and assistance. And with that, I’ll let Leana take over and lose my voice like you, Debbie, and pick up from there.

Leana Mann 1:22
Good afternoon. Okay, so the PowerPoint isn’t in your books, but it is up on the screen.

We did a couple different analysis this year. We looked again at our CAD comparisons of how we compare to other CADs, and as well as our workload increase staffing overview. We did a professional salary survey by a company Pearl Meyer is the company that did it. We did a benefit survey, and then we’ll talk about some highlights from the proposed budget for 2021 we pulled some data from the most recent comptroller survey. So Travis CAD we have the third highest market value in the state,

and just for comparison, we would be most comparable to Dallas, Tarrant, and Bexar.

Go to the next page, Davina,

So we have 281 billion,

Marya Crigler 2:30
And then that actually went up for 2022, to $451 billion

Leana Mann 2:39
A helpful statistic that we use in weighing appraisal districts and their performance is the budget as a percent of market value. And Travis CAD has the lowest budget as a percent of market value. We’re running at a point 0072% which is comparable with Dallas, who’s at a point 0078.

Another percentage that we use, and we talked about this last year, is the budget as a percent of total levy, and that levy is how much revenue we generate from the for the taxing entities. And Travis CAD is running at a point four zero, which is the lowest in the state out of all the CADS. And then based on market value, levy, budget, we like to compare ourselves to Dallas, Tarrant, and Bexar when we’re doing analysis, they’re really the three most comparable CADS out of the metro CADS. And so for the rest of our statistics we analyze, we’re going to really focus on those three other CADs. So the number of protests filed Travis CAD. And again, this is looking at 2020 protests filed. We had 124,110 protests. And you can see where we kind of compare to the other CADS. And again, this was the year that we didn’t reappraise. So the protests were lower. We’re at, Marya will talk about it in our regular meeting, but we’re at about 165,000

Marya Crigler 4:11
168,000 as of this morning.

Leana Mann 4:13
So we’ve increased substantially. It’ll put us more comparable with the Dallas level of protests. Something kind of interesting about this is our percentage of protests compared to our our total value and as of total parcels. So we run about 64 65% of total value under protest, which is significantly higher than the other CADs. We also have a higher number of lawsuits, we run about 17, 18% of total loss, total value under lawsuit, which is very comparable with the major metro CADs, Dallas and Bexar. But we are the highest, with 50 billion under lawsuit.

Marya Crigler 4:58
And part of that is because in Austin and Travis County, we have the highest values per parcel in the state.

Leana Mann 5:08
And so all that kind of leads to our increased workload that we’ve experienced. We talked about this last year. We looked at our 10 year change, and everything’s increased. So the number of new subdivisions we’re having to process, the number of new lots, the number of field inspections we’re having to do, exemptions processed, everything’s going up that we have more work that has to get completed to meet our statutory obligations. But we have the same number of staff up until last year’s budget or this year’s budget, we’ve ran consistently or right around 130 staff members. We did increase to 143 last year, and we’ll, we’ll request an additional 10 this year, which would put us at 153. And just compared to those other three Metro CADs, we’re, we’re significantly lower staffed than them. Dallas runs 242 full time positions, and we’re at 143 so that’s a significant difference. One statistic that I I’d like to look at is how much, how many people in our staff are working more than our 40 hours a week. It has increased almost double since 2017. This is only looking at exempt staff, of course, not our hourly staff, but we’re on track this year to work about 8700-9000 hours over the required 40 hours a week, which is it’s a lot, and it takes it really puts a toll on our staff.

So yes, so for the 2023 budget, we’ll be requesting 10 new positions. Five of these are part of our GIS team. We previously outsourced our GIS services to a company that did all of the mapping and those technical skills within GIS while that was great and it worked well, we do feel like based on the number of new subdivisions and deeds that have to get processed, we’d like to bring that back in house. So the the five staff out of the 10 are bringing that department back in house,

Marya Crigler 7:19
And we looked at the cost of bringing it back in house, and it is not going to increase our cost versus our contract with a third party.

Leana Mann 7:34
We continue to struggle to find qualified applicants. We’re competing with some major private sector organizations like Amazon, when I wrote, did this presentation back in April, they had 1600 open positions at Amazon just in the Austin metro. And then, of course, Tesla is coming. They had 20 open positions with multiple spots within that position posted online. And because we continue to struggle with staffing, we did hire a consulting firm to do a salary survey just to see if our salaries and us being lower were the reason we’re not finding, finding qualified people. But this is throughout all the marketplace. Y’all heard it. I think everyone’s struggling with staffing right now.

So we hired Pearl Meyer. They’re a nationally recognized competition firm.

So we have a couple staff that when our GIS service was outsourced, we moved them into other departments, and we plan on bringing a couple of those back. We recently hired a GIS tech that we found, I believe, from Austin Community College. So we’ve had some good luck in the GIS services and finding people.

So we hired Pearl Meyer, they’re a nationally recognized firm, to do a compensation survey, and they looked not only at appraisal districts and government organizations, but in the private sector as well, to see how we compared. They have a very thorough outlined process of the steps they go through, and we can provide that if you’re interested, but they look at percentiles, and so we really focus on the 50th percentile, that median. It typically reflects the rate for a job performed at a fully competent level. And so our analysis of what their study shows, we focused just on the median.

They also trended the data to July 1. So they did a time trend on the salaries based on their their data points that they have, which are proprietary.

And so we took our step and grade system, they gave us some data back, and we took our step and grade and broke it into the low, mid, and high and compared that to their data points, and they did kind of entry level, middle, and higher end employees for each skill set that they looked at. Not all positions were mapped. It was really hard to find and match some of our positions, but they covered probably 85%

Starting with our clerical group, our customer service department, we currently have 15 employees, our appraisal support clerks, we have 15 and then we have 2 deed clerks currently. And what they found was, on average, we are well, well, our salaries are good in those clerical positions. We were a little higher than the median of what they were reporting. So for these groups, our salaries were competitive, and we wouldn’t recommend a change.

Blanca Zamora Garcia 10:55
What is the starting salary on for a clerical position for customer service?

Leana Mann 11:00
It’s around 17.50

And just as a reminder, in September of last year, we did that salary increase. They got a 12% increase in September to all salaries in those clerical divisions. In our administrative clerical positions, these are higher skilled clerical positions. So we have our admin assistants and our GIS techs again, they found that our salaries are competitive, and they were in the group that received a 12% increase in September also. And then our legal assistants. We did find that the salaries are lower than the market median by about 12 and a half percent. So we if we were to make a recommendation, those would need to be adjusted in our appraiser divisions, our BPP appraisers, we have six people there. The conclusion was that the salaries were lower than the market median by about 9%.

In residential, we have 40 appraisers, and again, the they are lower than the market median by 12.7% and then our commercial appraisers, which we have seven employees, those were competitive with the market. And they’re in a different grade than our residential and BPP appraisers, so that’s kind of to be expected. In our management, our team leads, we have eight team leads across our different departments. It did find that we were about 11% lower than the market medium. And then in our managers, we have a total of six, they found we were about 9% lower than the market median. And then our director level, they found that we were about five and a half to 6% lower than the market median. And when we did our salary adjustments back in September, our clerical staff got 12% and then our appraisers got a lower amount, and directors only got 3% so it it the survey shows us what we kind of expected. We increased more clerical last year, and so those other categories need to be brought back up.

So a couple proposals that we added to the 2023, budget. We split our customer service department into two groups, so we’ll have our customer service representatives that will assist our customers, that on the telephone and in person. And then we propose to have an exemption clerk group. This would be some of our longer term employees, more experienced, they would be in a slightly higher grade, but they would be solely focused on processing exemptions. And then there, there’s also four other adjustments that we’d like to make, moving legal assistants to a one grade up to a grade six, BPP and residential appraisers, adjusting them to a grade six, moving our team leads to a grade nine, and our management positions to a grade 15. And this will provide a little more distinction between the different types of jobs that people are doing. You can see all of our clerical would be grouped in the grades two through five. Appraisers would all be six through 10. IT more technical jobs would be in grade 12, and then management would be 15 through 20.

And here’s a snapshot of what we did in September. We did clerical a 12% adjustment, the appraisers got a 7% adjustment, and management got a 3% so what we’ve proposed in the 2023 adjustment is a 0% adjustment to clerical, 5% to appraisers, and then 5% to management, which would put the appraisers in the clerical at a total adjustment of 12, it would be the same and management would be at eight. And then, of course, we’ve experienced a lot of inflation. You hear it in the news every day. Gas prices are going up, cost of foods going up. And so we are proposing a 3% COLA cost of living adjustment to the entire system. And so that would put our total adjustment between 11 and 15 over the 2021, and 2022 budget years.

The proposed budget is $25,000,683 and that represents a 12.72% increase over last year’s budget. The bulk of that are the 10 new positions that are being requested to the 2023 budget, bringing us to 153 proposed positions.

Again, our current contract with BIS consulting to do GIS work is 156,000 but bringing those staff back in house, it actually there’s a no change to the budget on that. We also did a benefits survey of our staff. We had 61 employees that responded, and then we ranked. We kind of separated those two groups based on age and then based on tenure, to see if there was a trend of what, what things those employees found most important in their benefits. So we asked how long they’ve been with the organization. We are, we were more heavily weighed to a younger demographic. So our tenure here is generally between the 10 and two and 10 years, but we do have some 10 and 20 years. The age group, we have a pretty proportionate bell curve based on age, which was actually surprising for me, because we are attracting younger employees, which is good for our succession planning. One thing that I found huge. We had 96 almost 97% of staff responded that they’re satisfied, or very satisfied, with our benefits, that that’s huge. We’ve Marya has done a lot of work to get our benefits as great as they are, and I think that stat really shows. And then in terms of importance, we asked them what to weigh salary and benefits. What do they think is most important? It was about 65% salary, 35% benefits.

The two highest ranked benefits were remote work and employee paid employer paid dependent health coverage, which that’s kind of the trend in the marketplace. We anticipated that remote work would be a high, highly sought after benefit.

Blanca Zamora Garcia 18:06
Are we going to continue to do remote work. Is that going on?

Marya Crigler 18:11
Whenever possible, we will continue to offer that as an opportunity for our employees. It’s, it’s when we’re interviewing, that’s the number one question that were asked by interviewees is, do we offer remote work?

Blanca Zamora Garcia 18:24
This customer service still working?

Marya Crigler 18:26
Customer service is in house. There’s, there’s a split between them, but a lot of them are in house, because we’ve got customers walking in, yes, and then we have

Blanca Zamora Garcia 18:34
No, that’s important, because there was, there’s been a lot of people complaining about customer service and their answers, their questions not being answered. So, and

Marya Crigler 18:44
We got a lot of new people in customer service. Our turnover in that department, the churn has been incredible. So lots of new trainees.

Blanca Zamora Garcia 18:54
So yeah, we need we need some more training there.

Marya Crigler 18:57
We need more retention. I need to get them in important get them trained and then be able to retain them. In some cases, we’re seeing them churn in months,

Leana Mann 19:08
days, even

Marya Crigler 19:09
in days, even so that churn and customer service.

Blanca Zamora Garcia 19:12
What do you think causes that?

Leana Mann 19:14
We’ve actually asked them so they’re treated just really bad by the public,

Blanca Zamora Garcia 19:23
Because they’re probably not the ones that need to talk to, and they can’t transfer that first, that person to the actual person they need to speak to. And I think that’s what it is.

Leana Mann 19:42
We did have 88 and a half percent of employees say that a COLA would be a desirable benefit to add to the budget. And we did put that in at 3%.

And there’s just a recap of the COLA and the adjustments that we’re proposing. Some of the other benefits that came up during the benefit survey that we’re going to implement a 529 college savings plan. The cost of college has increased substantially, and so a 529 allows you to save or it doesn’t even have to be your children. It could be anyone to go to a state college.

And there’s some information there about a 529, plan. There’s no income restrictions. There’s no restriction on who you can use it for. You can withdraw the money tax free, you can change who your beneficiary of the benefit is. So it’s a really good plan right now, we contribute 5% to a 401a retirement plan every year, no less than 5% so we’re proposing in our budget it would be a zero change to the budget, but taking that 5% and giving staff two options, so you can either put it into your retirement plan or put it into a 529 which gives them just more options for that 5% to be used. We’ll also be adding pet insurance. This was about 20% of our employees listed this as a benefit that they wanted. So there will be no cost to TCAD. We’re just going to sponsor a group plan that they can then elect into that plan. We also did an analysis of the auto allowance. We were considerably low compared to the other CADS. Currently, we pay $6,600 a year to auto allowance. I provided the other CADs, kind of where they were at. So we are proposing to change the auto allowance to 8400 a year, and that’s in the 2023 budget.

And all of that brings us to the 12, 12.72% increase from the 2020 for the 2023 proposed budget. Any items y’all like more information on?

We had an increase in our we call it co development. So we invest into our software into automation. It hasn’t increased from last year, but we have a set budget amount, I think it’s three or $400,000 every year that goes towards that.

Marya Crigler 22:49
And we also have a reserve fund for that. So if we find an automation or something that would be beneficial, we can dip into our reserves to implement that sooner. And we are, we are looking right now with our software vendor to help us with some of the shortages that we have and we were falling behind. We’ve got a co dev that should be coming out at the end of this week to help us automate the processing of the exemptions. So it was just a matter of waiting for our software vendor to get that development done for us, but we think that that should greatly ease our backlog.

Yeah, we are also looking at another vendor for imagery that the appraisal district uses, called Cyclo media, that offers some street level imagery with additional capabilities. So seeing if we can’t incorporate that within our budget, we think that there may be an opportunity for us to exchange some of our current imagery for this imagery, and make it not a budget increase, but kind of make it kind of a budget wash. We always want to be as budget conscious as we can. And if there’s a way that we can save to pay for something new, we want to take those opportunities.

Leana Mann 24:17
One thing we really focused on when we did the 2022 budget workshop in 2021 Marya came from she was the IT director before this, and so she really focused on automation, and that’s seen by the number of employees. We didn’t add staff for 10 years. We automated everything to the point that it really couldn’t be automated anymore. We just needed people.

Theresa Bastian 24:41
Interesting. I have a question. Can you give me a small like, an overview, breakdown of what goes into professional services as a category.

Leana Mann 24:50
Professional services are software as service. So our CAMA software vendor is the main one in there. And then, like our PR services, the Swagit for board meetings that will be in there.

Marya Crigler 25:01
IT security contract.

Bruce Elfant 25:05
How are y’all doing with vacancies? We’re all all of us have had lots of vacancies. It’s been a struggle.

Marya Crigler 25:24
It is we are exploring new ways to fill our vacancies. We’ve gotten new contacts with some of the colleges to do more of a outreach among recent graduates. We’ve got new contacts with the Texas Workforce Commission that we’re working through as well, and we are also making adjustments to the way that we hire and interview. In the past, we had the luxury of taking a little bit more time when an application came in, but what we’re finding is, if we don’t act on that application as soon as it comes in, that person is finding a different position. So we are now doing weekly calls, so if an application comes in during the week, we are calling and scheduling them very next week to come in for the interview, so that that application doesn’t get stale and that they don’t find other opportunities. So we are working really hard to fill our vacancies, but it still continues to be a struggle. But I don’t think we’re unique.

Bruce Elfant 26:24
No, do yo all have a lot of vacancies?

Marya Crigler 26:27
Yeah, we’ve got quite a few. We’ve got, oh, 10 vacancies in appraisal positions, I think.

Leana Mann 26:33
There’s 13 in appraisal.

Marya Crigler 26:35
We just have a retiree today celebrating her retirement. So we continue to have some attrition in our staff. We had two commercial appraisers leave us to go work for tax agents. So yeah,

Bruce Elfant 26:46
do you think is it money? Is it salary? It’s and if so, do you think that these increases is going to help reduce the losing people?

Marya Crigler 26:58
I think part of it is going to be salary. The other part is going to be work life balance, because for our staff, we have gotten so much more work and we’re working so much overtime that we’re not achieving that work life balance that they’re looking for. And so we see a lot of people leaving us because they’re getting other opportunities that provide them a greater work life balance.

Bruce Elfant 27:21
And some of that overtime is because of vacancies, right?

Marya Crigler 27:23
Yes, yeah. It’s a vicious cycle, yeah, that we’re dealing with. So I think that, you know, I think once we get staffed up, then we can kind of alleviate some of that burden, some of that overtime strain on staff. And then, you know, as we get new technology, new things, implemented with our new software vendor. We just went with the new software vendor this year, so it’s a new software as we get more things and we’re more familiar with it, I think that will ease it some a bit. But I also think we need to make it as a legislative priority, that we need the tax calendar to be fixed or adjusted. Because what I’m dealing with right now, we had 140,000 protests last year. We have 168,000 protests this year, I’ve got 28,000 more protests that I’ve got to deal with in the same amount of time. And right now, for our property owners, we’re doing an informal to get everybody in. We calculated it’s about five minutes to six minutes per informal. Taxpayers don’t feel heard when you only give them that amount of time, but, but, yeah, but, but given you know, our lack of resources and time we don’t really have, we don’t have a luxury to do much more. So we really are pressing legislatively that there needs to be something done so that our calendar can be extended and we’ve got enough time to do our informals and formal hearings and give the taxpayers more time. But when we still have a July 20 deadline to approve the roll, on 25th to certify and we still get increasing volume, we’re struggling to figure out

Bruce Elfant 28:56
Are most of your employees able to telework, at least some?

Marya Crigler 29:00
Most of them are, yes, we’ve got

Bruce Elfant 29:02
So you’re able for most of your job postings, you’re able to offer telework.

Marya Crigler 29:06
Yes, we do for most of them. Now, you know, a lot of the customer spacing positions don’t have that luxury, and when we’re in our ARB season, we’ve got to be a little bit more present because of in person hearings. But when we can, we do try to offer that as a additional benefit of working with the appraisal district?

Bruce Elfant 29:29
Well, hopefully getting these salaries up a little bit will reduce the attrition.

Marya Crigler 29:34
Yeah, and it’s from for us, really it’s retention is key, because it takes so long to get somebody educated on the property tax system and all the nuances that you know, if you’re constantly having new hires, then they’re not as educated. But, you know, we’re our front lines are a lot of brand new people, and so the answers that they give are not always the best answers, but they’re doing the best that they can. But you know, they’re just so green, and that’s just because we’re not able to retain the people once we get them trained up, and that’s really going to be for me, key is we want to make sure that we’re getting retention on our staff.

Yeah, yeah,

We are working closely with some universities to see if we can’t get more programs in place to encourage more people to look at government. And then the other thing is, a lot of younger people are not looking to government as a career, so it’s not as attractive as it used to be to go work for government.

Leana Mann 30:56
Even when I graduated, which was so a few years ago, but when I left graduated college, governments weren’t in the job fairs. It wasn’t even a thought to go work for a government. I ended up here, but it was by chance. I don’t think it. We’re going to make an effort to go to some job fairs and really put the appraisal district out there as a good place to work and make a career.

Marya Crigler 31:44
Yeah, we just need to be competitive with the appraisals in terms of salaries to attract them.

James Valadez 31:59
Anyone else have any questions about the budget? Do I have a motion to adjourn this work session?

That’s moved by Blanca, moved moved by Blanca and seconded by Miss Bastian at 12:45, on June 7, this work session is adjourned.