Board of Directors Meeting

850 E Anderson Lane and via videoconference

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

Public comment will be allowed via teleconference.  All public comment will occur at the beginning of the meeting.  To speak remotely at this meeting persons must register online at https://traviscad.org/speaker-registration no later than 1.5 hours prior to the meeting start time. Approximately one hour prior to the meeting start time, speakers will receive email instructions on how to login to participate in the meeting. Emails will come from [email protected].

Agenda
Meeting Documents
Meeting Audio
Meeting Minutes

Transcript
This transcript is provided as a courtesy and may contain minor errors.

James Valadez 0:02
Good afternoon. I’d like to call the regular meeting of the Travis Central Appraisal District Board of Directors to order. The time is 12:45, on Tuesday, 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’re also continuing to provide this meeting as a zoom call, as a courtesy. First item on our agenda is citizens communication,

Marya Crigler 0:29
And I think we do have one speaker signed up for citizens communication, and he’s going to be by a phone so

Mr. Alcron, if he could unmute himself

James Valadez 1:19
And press star six to unmute yourself.

Star six.

Travis County Taxpayer 1:38
Okay, are we connected?

James Valadez 1:43
We have you now.

Travis County Taxpayer 1:45
No good. Thank you. Hi, yes. Hi. My name is Eduardo Alarcon, and my comments only deal only with the Lake Travis shoreline, because that’s what I’m familiar with.

And the reason we’re talking is I want my comments to serve to strip the TCAD board of any qualified immunity or plausible deniability they currently enjoy.

Once my comments are part of the TCAD official record, any TCAD board will not be able to feign ignorance at TCAD failures in process and procedures.

I’ve been battling this for a long time. TCAD currently allows individual TCAD appraisers to randomly apply random and unsupported appraisals to property lining Lake Travis.

I’ve only begun to educate members of the press, individual companies and law offices whose main business is challenging the shoddy appraisal practices within TCAD, including the total failure of TCAD management,

As an example of how miserably TCAD fails in serving the private Leana Mann, an employee of TCAD

promised to notify me of any upcoming board directors or meeting, yet completely failed to follow through and keep me informed so I could participate in this meeting.

My expectation is for this board to step up, do its job, clean house and install a professional management team

as you would find at IBM or AMD or Tesla

I product provided the documentation to Leanne Mann, who informed me, she had forwarded that information to each member of this TCAD board.

Hey guys, I’m open to discussing this further at your discretion. Thank you for my three minutes.

James Valadez 4:41
Thank you so much. Is that the only speaker we have?

Okay?

We will move on to the item four on our agenda, the consent agenda. These items may be acted upon by one motion, no separate discussion or vote of any items will be had unless requested by a board member. The Consent Agenda consists of the approval of the minutes from the February 17, 2022 meeting section, 2525 fee report, accounting statements and personnel report. I’ll give the board some time to review those documents, and then if anyone has any of those items that they’d like pulled for further discussion. We can make that motion.

Does anyone have anything that they’d like pulled?

Okay, so is that a motion to approve? Okay? Seconded okay. The motion has been made by Miss Blanca Garcia and seconded by Theresa Bastian to approve the Consent Agenda. All of those in favor, All those opposed. Okay, that motion carries unanimously. We will move on to Item five A, which is our regular agenda, discussion and possible action on taxpayer liaison report.

Martin Wilbanks, Taxpayer Liaison 7:08
Okay, actually, the activities for May, for this year are surprisingly similar in terms of number and the types we had last year. In fact, year to date, surprisingly, the number of interactions I’ve had with property owners is very similar, and the types of activities are very similar. The big difference, I think, between last year and this year are two. One is the property owners are surprisingly, just absolutely angry, and so it’s taking more work to calm them down, make sure they’ve been heard before I can actually get to their issue. The second issue is that there is a amazing confusion factor between what is an assessed value versus what’s the market value and how this 10% cap works. I’ve even had people think that the taxes have a 10% cap on so that’s been a major issue. So I think what we probably need to do is create a little module for the website that really addresses the issue of assessed value and market value. And I volunteer to do that.

Marya Crigler 8:28
Several videos out there under webinars and videos, and I did one specifically on assessed versus market value under videos on our website.

Martin Wilbanks, Taxpayer Liaison 8:38
That’s wonderful. I’ll make sure I find where that is refer people to it, incredibleconfusion.

So any questions about my report that I’ve provided to you. I’ve done a little reformating on my report. I hope it makes a little bit easier to follow. I appreciate the opportunity for having an opportunity to talk to you today.

Thank you. I want you to know it’s great when I get a thank you at the end of the day, and I’ve gotten a few thank yous from how appraisers are handling themselves at this COVID hearing, and I pass that along to the next but it’s great to see a thank you for the work that staff at TCAD does. I could not do my job without the test.

James Valadez 9:49
Thank you for being here today. Thank you too.

Marya Crigler 9:54
And one of the things that we from customer complaints that we are hearing a lot about but we’re working on and is just some confusion of how to use the online, informal process. So we are developing more materials to explain it to property owners. We find that those that are struggle more with technology, struggle more with the process, and those that are familiar with it seem to breeze right through. So we are working with more materials to help assist them when they’re having issues and address those kind of issues.

James Valadez 10:29
That’s great. Thank you so much.

We will move on to Item 5b on our regular agenda, which is discussion and possible action on ARB Chairman report.

Craig Phifer, ARB Chair 10:48
Share with you again. My name is Craig Phifer. I’m chair of the ARB. First off, I appreciate the opportunity that you gave the ARB the position with Miss Thompson’s appointment, it’s been invaluable service to the transition. It is transition. We lost a lot of historical knowledge, and with Mr. King and Ms. Becker transitioning out, she’s helped bring that back, and it’s been highly valuable to me. Been in since January has been a key component, as opposed to my process with two predecessors before me not having an opportunity to really get in understand how things work and who to work with, Ms. Crigler and Leana Mann have been instrumental in that we’ve tried to work as close as we can with them and taking their needs into consideration and to scheduling and going forward as it’s it’s been a good relationship so far, and we’ve tried accommodate. We one of the things we did what I’ve done with urging for Ms. Thompson was to go and visit with some of the agencies, talk to them what their needs were. And one of the things we kept hearing was we really don’t want to come and sit down in a panel of three amateurs. We would like to have a conversation with professionals. That’s the informal process. So we didn’t push too hard about trying to schedule early. We did push them hard to get in and get their protest filed so that they could get into informal early. And they they didn’t all heed that information. They wanted to play the process. And that’s that’s okay. We’re going to do our part. The district’s doing their part to get the formals heard, and we’ll we’ll pick up with the informals on the 21st of June to this week, there’s activity in the building. We’re hearing the 2021 late and a corrections from last year that were held over. It’s a good opportunity for us to feel the growing pains and do a little stress test of the system to have an idea. So around the 21st we don’t have to trip over ourselves. We will have the process already begun. It’s been a little good next week we start over 65 and the veterans give them the first opportunity in the door. I had the mandate in the interviewing process for the judge’s office to address training. Training has been a lack of for the last two years, not because nobody wanted to do it, just because of the environment and COVID so but we we brought training significantly back. We provided eight hours for all the new appointees. In addition to the Comptroller’s mandated eight hours online, the Comptroller’s office did not offer a in person opportunity in Austin this year, and so it’s no charge. We elected to have everybody go ahead and view it online at their pace, but then supplemental with our own staff, eight hours each in a group setting, broken into multiple groups. In addition, we brought back to 2021, folks who didn’t get an opportunity to have formal training. We brought them back in, and we gave them an opportunity to have a half a day. And really it was to help to reinforce good habits, good best practices. Kind of re-engage them in the law as well. Regular members, those people who’ve been around for a couple of years and value the second term, we brought them back and into chair training with the participation that the majority of them would all participate as a panel chair. So we brought them in for half a day, gave them some additional training, separate groups, and then we have brought them in again for late hearings and corrections. We brought them in last week so that, since we’re doing those this week, we wanted it fresh on their minds. Gave them some flow charts to understand the law, what they could do, what they can’t do. Now, it may not be perfect, but it helps if we could cut down some of our mistakes. And that was, that was the purpose of that, and get them thinking. Because this is the week we’re getting started. Um, other than that, we start on the 21st in earnest with the top dollar down by portfolio. We visited the district and gave them our directive in the subject of appointees. We had 91 appointees by the judge’s office this year. We’re down to we’ve retained 48 of those 91 there the reoccurring if the statement that we keep getting for most of these folks is I didn’t realize this was really a seasonal, full time job. I thought it was a part time job. I thought I could do this strictly remotely. I didn’t know that I had to come back. How can I run my business if I have to be there? I never had an interview, I submitted my application and I had a letter of a set of appointment. So we need to tune in our message about their appointments and what the job expectation is, because I really would like going forward, is that to let them know we’ll we’re always going to run a hybrid. It’s obvious now going forward that this is going to be remote and in person, but we have a lot of people requesting remotes, and so we’re going to have to have people in. I’d like to be able to let people know the job is here first, and then we can accommodate appropriately. We’re always going to have half our staff. I believe we’ll have at least half our staff remote. Going forward, we are going to seek 45 panels to start with whatever the district will whatever they can provide. We have to move down to 40. We’ll do we’ll accommodate the best we can. But the most sensible thing is to provide the best opportunity for property owners to have their protest firm in a fair environment. We’re here to do that. Thank you all just we have 148 current members.

James Valadez 18:13
Thank you so much for that update.

Marya Crigler 18:18
And also just to mention for Mr. Phifer that they have included in your board procedures, the hearing procedures for 2022 which they’re required to present to our board of directors.

James Valadez 18:34
Thank you so much.

The next item on our agenda is 5c discussion and possible action on the chief appraisers report to include the 2022 protest season, mass appraisal report, 2021 annual report and taxpayer outreach programs.

Marya Crigler 18:53
And we provided the mass appraisal report and the annual report in your packets. If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer those, but those are more informational for you. I’ll focus in giving you more update on what our protest season is shaping up to look like this year, and then Cynthia will do another presentation on some of the outreach that we’ve done. But as of these numbers in the report that we’ve given to you guys, or as of yesterday, we did surpass it this morning, but as of yesterday, we had 167,959 protests that have been filed. We’re seeing that there’s a split 75 25% split between agent and owner represented with agents representing about 75% of the protests by count and owners being 20, 25% we are seeing in terms of our overall appraisal role, 35% of our parcels by count and 58% of our value is under protest, which again creates a significant hurdle for us to achieve certification. The Appraisal Review Board has to reach that 90% by July 20 in order for us to approve the records and certify the role and get that information over to the appraisal district. It’s a significant number that they have to do. We’re up nearly 28,000 protests over last year, and so we’re trying to be as as accommodating to property owners as we can, but still understanding we’ve got a lot of volume that we’ve got to get through in a very limited amount of time. We anticipate that we’ll be able to reach our certification goals by July 19, based on the scheduling directives that we’ve got so far. Again, this is assuming that we don’t get another flood of additional protests, or that we don’t see a lot of reschedules or things that don’t get completed in a timely manner. But if we’re able to do that, everything that we need to do, we should reach our 90% threshold by July 19.The board likes to see if the ARB can get completed with all protests by the end of August. But I don’t think that that’s going to be capable, they’re going to be capable of that this year, just given the volume that we have. So I do anticipate that we will be running in well into September, maybe towards the end of September before we’re able to complete all of the protests that we’ve gotten so far. And that’s all the timely filed protests that we’ve received this year. But we will work for it. I’ve also given you some stats in terms of the breakdown of what we’ve got. We received quite a few more than we anticipated, in terms of taxpayers, that’s self identified as disabled persons over 65 or military, and those hearings have to go first, so we’ve got those scheduled up early in the season. Typically, the directives from the ARB is to work value down, because we’ve got to get to 90% of value. But when you have to do the disabled persons military and over 65 sometimes those are lower valued, but they’re taking time away from us. So we did see that we had over 3662 of those and they have been scheduled. We will start those hearings next week and move into the following week, completing those hearings, and then after that, our directives for from the ARB is we are working by property type, by agency, by value, dollar, down, grouping those that have made same day request as much as possible, I always calculate what our inflection point is, what is the value above which we must complete in order to reach that 90% value threshold. And our value threshold this year is about $1.1 million so we need to work all accounts valued 1.1 million and up in order to reach certification by our deadline. And that’s kind of what we’ve got scheduled again. There are some accounts that have made a request for same day hearing where the grouping includes one of those high valued accounts, so that entire group must be processed as a whole. But again, we are working as hard as we can to get that done.

We are doing informals. We have not with the exception of property owners, that paper filed requesting an informal for those property owners, we did set their informal date, but all other property owners, we have allowed them to set their own informal scheduling date so they can get in line online and select their own informal date, which we find is a preference for most property owners versus getting assigned the date and time from the appraisal district. And that has worked really well. I think from property owners, they really appreciate having the flexibility to choose their own date. We’ve encouraged people in our town halls and everything else. We’ve encouraged people to get in line early, as early as possible, to ensure that you’ve got a spot and that you get time. But you know, it is human nature. Just like we get a lot of our protests on the deadline, I anticipate that we’ll get a ton of people wanting to come in for an informal at the very last minute, and again, when it comes to that point, we will have to crank through those really quickly in order to get them all done. We are slated to do informals through June 30 and then we will transition to focusing primarily on getting formal hearings and ARB formal hearings done, but we will have some overtime overlap time when we’re doing both of those. Are there any questions about our ARB process or our numbers or plans that we’ve got moving forward? We’re just, you know, we are trying to work as cooperatively as we can with everybody, to be as accommodating as possible, but the time constraints are a significant burden for the appraisal district. So that is everything that I had on the chief appraisals report.

James Valadez 24:59
Okay. No questions. We’ll move on to the next item on our agenda. That is 5d discussion of possible action on the 2022 proposed budget to include directives to staff regarding the proposed budget,

Marya Crigler 25:17
And this would be to get any additional feedback from you guys from our work session. If there are any directives or things that you want us to look at in terms of the proposed budget.

James Valadez 25:28
The one thought that I had was, I know we’ve circled back September 21 when we made the adjustment on clerical side, and now we’re kind of heading towards more of an administrative white collar versus blue collar balance. And I’m wondering if there’s anything that Leana maybe you can think of that would help us blend that in subsequent budget years so that we don’t kind of have this imbalance if we were going to pick one side to give that allocation towards first. I’m glad we went on the clerical side at the time that we did. But I’m wondering anything on on your side, just preemptively that you can think of moving forward into future budget cycles that will help us blend,

Leana Mann 26:10
I think a modified version of the salary survey that we did, it was, it was very cost effective. I think doing that and looking at it every year. Obviously, as the market changes in Austin, there’s going to be more there’s types of jobs that are going to be higher, more highly sought after, and we have to weigh that into it. But I think as a whole, we could look at everyone each year in some form of a salary survey.

James Valadez 26:38
I did like the data surrounding age and kind of benefits and perks to better inform us on how to craft hiring policies. I think that’s the type of thing that we need to be focused on as an organization right now, just to draw as much talent as we can with the components for which we can put dollars to work that potentially aren’t even having to come out of our side, just like sponsoring a plan that they could opt into or opt out of, right?

Leana Mann 27:11
If there’s no further directives. No, we don’t need a motion.

James Valadez 27:20
Okay. Go on to the next item. That item is 5e discussion and possible action on the 2021 annual comprehensive financial report and audit results.

Leana Mann 27:38
And our auditor from Eide Bailly is here, I’ll go grab him. Kevin Randolph from Eide Bailly, our auditors, is here to present the audit findings for y’all. We’ve included in the book, the audit letter, the audit opinion, and then also the letter for the board from the auditors.

Kevin Randolph, Eide Bailly 28:29
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kevin Randolph with Eide Bailly, and I’m here to go over the 2021 audit report. Excuse me, I’ll be glad to answer any questions. Next slide, please. I’llgo over the audit opinion briefly, which is on pages three to five of the ACFR. Reminder of management is responsible for the preparation and presentation of financial statements, including internal controls over those financial statements. As auditor, my responsibility is to express an opinion on those financial statements, and we did issue an, what we call an unmodified opinion on those financial statements, which means that we found those financial statements were consistent with generally accepted accounting principles, and we had no issues or findings to report.

Next slide.

This is page 27 of the ACFR. This is a statement of net position or balance sheet. This lists the district’s assets and liabilities and net position or equity. And this presents it on a comprehensive basis, and it includes long term items such as capital assets of land, buildings, equipment, the district’s net pension asset, and then long term liability, such as the district’s note payable for its building, and then the district’s post retirement health care liability. Total assets as of December 31 2021 were $31.4 million that includes cash of 4 million investments of 4.8 million accounts receivable of 1.3 million and net pension asset of 1.3 million. That’s for the district’s participation in the TCDRS pension plan. Each year, TCDRS hires an actuary to value that plan, and that’s the value of the district’s funded position at the end of the year, which is good to have an asset versus a liability capital assets 19 point 5 million. Liabilities were 23 million, and that consists of accounts payable and accrued liabilities of 1.9 million, earned revenue of 2.6 million, note payable for the building of 9.2 million, and the district’s OPEB or post retirement healthcare liability of 8.1 million, and that nets to net position or equity of just under 9 million. I’m going to go over some of those numbers a little more briefly on the next slide. This is page 30, which is the governmental funds balance sheet, and this excludes those long term items just went over. And I’ll go over this again briefly. As of December 31 total assets were 10.6 million, and that consists again of cash and investments of just under 8.8 million. And those investments of 4.8 million were held with text pool. Receivables were 1,380,000 and that is amounts due from your taxing entities for their quarterly assessments that they owe you for services provided. Prepaid items. Those are 2022 services that the district purchased in 2021 and paid those bills in 2021 primarily computer and software maintenance and then insurance, and those will become expenditures in 2022 accounts payable and accrued liabilities. Accounts Payable is 1.5 million, and that’s just amount amounts due to vendors at December 31 that had not yet been paid. Accrued payroll is payroll earned by district employees that had not yet been paid. That was $360,000 earned revenue was $2.6 million that is cash that district received in 2021, for the first quarter of 2022 assessments from your taxing entities, and since they paid you in 2021 but it was for 2022 services. We can’t show that as revenue until 2022 by net assets and liabilities on lifted fund balance. Fund balance was $6,143,517 and I’m going to go over that on the next page. Page 42 excuse me, I’m sorry. Total fund balance was $6,143,517 that’s made up of three buckets. The first is what we call committed fund balance. That is fund balance the district, at its discretion, has set aside for future purposes. And that committed fund balance was $3,075,106 and down below, you can see a snip from page 42 of the ACFR, which lists out those commitments. And that’s for computer equipment, network infrastructure, technology enhancements, and the biggest piece of that is for future litigation. And again, that’s just fund balance the district has set aside for future specific purposes. Non spendable fund balance, $463,000 that equals the prepaid assets that we just went over. We just have to show that as non spendable. If we back that out, then we’re left with unassigned fund balance of $2,604,451 that can be used by the district to fund its ongoing obligations. I’ll go to the next slide.

Revenues for 2021 total revenues were $20,343,775 investment earnings of $3,382 and then charges for services miscellaneous, or 146,000 but the biggest chunk of revenue is appraisal assessments. Those are the quarterly amounts due from your various taxing entities where they’re funding the services that you provide. And those totaled $20,193,913 for the year. Next slide, we’ll look at expenditures briefly. Total expenditures were $19,111,511 and as is typical for a cab, over half of those are related to payroll and related expenditures of $11.5 million legal and professional services were just under $2.9 million. And we’ll go to the next slide now.

Page 67 of the ACFR has a Budget to Actual comparison for the general fund. Budgeted revenues were $20,558,893 actual revenues were $20,343,775. Actual revenues were less than budgeted, primarily due to lower investment earnings, just interest rates and such were lower during the year than initially expected, so that caused actual revenues to be a little bit under budget. Revenues budgeted expenditures were $19,444,699 and. Actual were $18,362,000 so actual expenditures were less than budget expenditures, and those savings were realized primarily in payroll, legal, professional, other services and capital outlay.

I’ll go to the next slide. We separately issue a letter to the board where we’re required to tell you certain things, and I’m going to go through that letter. Through that letter briefly, we look for any significant risks, and one we always put on our audits is management override of controls. Any smaller entity, there’s always a risk that, if they wanted to, management could override controls more easily than a large organization, common audit risk and relatively smaller entities. And I just want to clarify that we found no specific risks here in that regard, and we had no issues with respect to Travis CAD so no issues or findings. That’s just something we mentioned in our audits, significant accounting estimates, net pension asset and the other post employment benefit liability. And again, those those amounts are not calculated by the district nor by us. They’re calculated by TCDRS and then by the actuary that the district employs for its post retirement health care. And we had no issues with those estimates, no difficulties with management, and we had no disagreements with management, either on matters of policy or their accounting treatment. And we had no other issues. And again, we had no no findings this year to report. So a good, clean audit, and that’s all I really have. I would like to compliment Ms. Mann and the rest of the staff. Everyone here is really cooperative and easy to work with, and we get this thing done pretty fast. So I nodded, is a lot of work. So I would just like to commend her for her preparation. That’s all I had today.

James Valadez 36:44
Thank you so much for that report. It was very informative, and as always, thank you for being here. Thank you, glad to work with you. No action on this.

Leana Mann 36:54
We need a motion to approve the audit.

James Valadez 37:00
It’s been moved by Mr. Buckle and seconded by Vivek. Okay, any further discussion on this item? Hearing? None. Let’s take a vote. All those in favor, All those opposed. The motion passes unanimously. We will move on to Item 5f of our regular agenda, discussion and possible action on waiver of penalties and interests accrued by the city of Austin.

Marya Crigler 37:33
And this is the entities are required to make quarterly payments to us, City of Austin during COVID, during the pandemic. They had some personnel changes and it was just an oversight on their part. They have never been late on a payment before, but because of the issues that they had, they were late on this one payment, so they have requested that the board waive the penalty and interest on that late payments

James Valadez 38:08
That has been moved by Ms. Cartwright, seconded by Mr. Buckle. Is there any discussion on this item?

Okay, hearing none. Let’s take a vote. All those in favor, All those opposed. That motion passes unanimously. We will move on to Item 5g of our regular agenda discussion and possible action on adjustment to 2022 pay schedule.

Leana Mann 38:36
We added an agenda item just in case you all wanted to make any adjustment from the work session that we reviewed. I think if we were to make recommendation, it might be to do the COLA and beginning probably September, but we could add that to a future agenda, if you’d like.

James Valadez 38:53
And that’s kind of what I was getting at on the query about how to blend that better. I’m thinking on that COLA, if we could kind of stair step into that in subsequent years, as we feel that changing, we can, you know, get a quarter percent and have that, you know, compounded monthly, or whatever the number shakes out to, I feel like it could blend a little bit more nicely so that it’s not a surprise in subsequent years. But it’s a question of, I guess, for the board, is what you’re saying when we incorporate the 3% is that what your question is?

Leana Mann 39:32
We just added the agenda item if you wanted to, so you had the option.

James Valadez 39:40
Can you speak to the availability of that funding? I know we’ve already kind of been over that, but can you speak to the source, and then the implement, implementation of it, and kind of how you see that going, or how quickly that could move.

Leana Mann 39:55
So we’ve done a COLA one other time back in 2015. I would imagine the COLA would be implemented at where all employees receive the same amount at the same time so there’s no disparity or anger from employees. I would prefer to do it probably September one, so that we can iron our budget a little little more closer to the end of the year. It would cost under 300,000 to 3% COLA but it is an ongoing cost, not a one time cost.

James Valadez 40:33
And just to clarify, the 300,000 is included in the subsequent year’s budget, as previously

Speaker 1 40:40
It is in the proposed 2023 budget, and 2022 funds would be used just from vacancies in our staffing,

James Valadez 40:51
in the event that we implement it.

Leana Mann 40:53
Correct

James Valadez 40:53
Yeah,

Marya Crigler 41:07
When we made our salary adjustments last year, we did it in September, and that was very, very appreciated by staff, particularly as they were coming out of a very stressful season, so it is always appreciated by staff. It helps us with morale, and it does help us with retention, because it helps us remain competitive.

Nicole Conley 41:31
You can whisper, we’ll say it again.

James Valadez 41:46
My inclination. The statement was, should we go ahead now and utilize the existing funds, bronchitis or something? I like, I like, what you were kind of touching on just now. Though about the morale component of it, I do think there’s some semblance of boost in morale associated simply with the passage of it, but I do think there’s a tangible value in getting those funds delivered as quickly as we can. What is the position of the balance of the board?

Theresa Bastian 42:20
I agree. Are we looking for a motion to approve it?

James Valadez 42:30
Yeah, I think I’m listing this item was here as a, as, like a, like a foot, foot holder program. So if, if with boards, if any board member is so inclined as to make the motion. We could entertain that.

Theresa Bastian 42:45
I’ll make the motion and to implement the COLA. And do we have to say the timing of it specifically?

James Valadez 42:55
and at a rate of

Theresa Bastian 42:58
3% across the board starting July. That’s the motion.

James Valadez 43:12
Okay. Is there a second? Okay, that item has been moved by Miss Bastian and seconded by Vivek. Is there any further discussion? Hearing none. Let’s take a vote.

Hearing none. Let’s take a vote. All those in favor, aye, All those opposed That motion passes unanimously.

Leana Mann 43:44
Thank you. I know the staff would be very appreciative.

Theresa Bastian 43:50
I think we’re all very appreciative of the staff, the work y’all are doing.

James Valadez 43:55
So we will move on to Item 5h of our regular agenda, which is discussion and possible action on changes to TCAD personnel policy.

Marya Crigler 44:05
And these are every other year, we go through and review our personnel policy, and we try to make sure that our written policy fits with what we are actively doing. So these are some proposed changes to our personnel policy, and we included a summary of all the proposed changes in that we are adding a statement about our practices of reviewing internal candidates for positions, particularly for promotions we’d like to promote from within our vehicle usage we have we found during the pandemic that if we hired somebody from out of state, there was a delay in their ability to get their Texas driver’s license, so extending that from 30 days to 90 days, allowing our TCAD issued logo shirts to be part of our official attire during the summer, just formalizing that. Again, updating our harassment policy, indicating that we will do a merit increase program, and allowing us for some specific latitude and flexibility in doing that, increasing the dual designation we’d like to have staff have multiple designations, not only the state RPA, but also designations from IAAO, and that’s just helping with their professional credentials. So we’re looking at increasing the designation, the amount that we award for those designations, increasing that by $250 increasing the available amount for tuition reimbursement to $1,000 per semester, adding the additional pet insurance, the dependent FSA to our employee benefits, adding our 529 college saving plan to our benefit package, and then also for our vacation hours and our carryover, removing the language for the 625 limitation, but including language strongly encouraging our our our members, to take advantage of their benefits of taking time and vacation off for their own mental wellness and well being, but removing the limitation and having the ability to do a payout of excess hours on that one, and then updating our scheduled holidays to officially recognize the June 19 federal holiday. And those were the proposed changes to the personnel policy. And we can answer any questions you might have.

James Valadez 46:42
So that all looked great. It was relatively straightforward. Does anyone have any questions?

Marya Crigler 46:55
We will get that amended to make sure that’s included. That was a point that we strongly think yes.

James Valadez 47:04
Pending getting that language added, is everything else, everything else looks good, okay, do we need a motion on that? Or do you want to come back with that added language, or pass as is contingent upon that language being adeed?

Theresa Bastian 47:18
That would be preferred.

James Valadez 47:19
Okay. Miss Cartwright maybe was making,

Theresa Bastian 47:33
I don’t know that everybody can hear the conversation going on down here. So there was a that’s all right, verbally, management is encouraging staff to take vacation hours, and as Cartwright was pointing out, doesn’t actually say that in the manual, but I think what we what would be, I think what would be helpful is to approve the changes to the manual that with the addition of this language in Section 8.8 vacation leave. Vacation Leave is offered to full time regular employees who are encouraged to use the benefit according to provisions of this policy. With that amendment, I’d like to move that we approve this changes to the policy.

James Valadez 48:26
Okay, this been moved by Miss Bastian and seconded by Mr. Buckle, with an assist from Miss Cartwright. Any further discussion on this item?

very thoroughly prepared.

Any further discussion on this item? Okay? Hearing none. We’ll take a vote all those in favor, All those opposed. That motion passes unanimously. We will move on to Item five: discussion and possible action on public communications and outreach TCAD website and accessibility of members of the board of directors.

Marya Crigler 49:09
And we will have Cynthia Martinez, who’s our communication director, do this presentation. But before she starts, I want to keep some praises upon her, because the job that she does, helping us with our communication efforts and media outreach is phenomenal, and I don’t know what we did before her, but I certainly wouldn’t want to imagine a life without her. She is really that important to our organization, and I just want to publicly say how much we appreciate all the work that she does

James Valadez 49:39
and the board as well. She does so much and so well,

Cynthia Martinez 49:42
I try. I sometimes tomorrow. I don’t know how y’all survive without me, but that kind of gets us started right, which is, for those of you that don’t know, I started in this position at the end of September in 2019, and prior to that, TCAD did not have someone in charge of Communications and Public Relations, and so we’ll go through, kind of the different things that I do and how that’s manifested. But really, when it came down to it, there was no central person overlooking everything, and no central person kind of looking at things from the point of view of a standard property owner. A lot of times, the policies and procedures and the language that we were using were geared towards our more educated audiences, like tax agents or tax attorneys, and so sometimes we weren’t always being the most accessible. Also that lack of officially designating an official person to handle things meant that while there were a lot of things that we could have done better, there were also a lot of problems that weren’t addressed appropriately or as quickly, or maybe didn’t come to our attention when they should have. And so mole hills became mountains, that kind of a thing. So when I started at the end of September in 2019 so we’re looking at about three years now that we’re going to go over how we shifted things. And for those of you that have been here longer than three years, which is about half of you, I really, really hope that you’ve seen the change. I feel like we felt the change and that things are going well. But it started off by assessing what are the goals of our communications program and of what we are trying to do? And I narrowed it down to three things. The first was education. Obviously, we want people to be aware of the role that we play, how the system works, what we can and what we can’t do. You know, there were simple things like the fact that people don’t understand that we aren’t the same as the ARB, people get us confused with the tax office all the time. You know, as Mr. Wilbanks was talking about people not understanding the difference between market value and assessed value and taxable value, those kinds of things. So essentially creating a forum to where we are educating people on how all of this works, so that they can feel empowered and they can understand when things don’t go right, you know, there is a certain value saying, yes, your market value went up 100% but that’s actually what the market is doing. And so how do you kind of use that to mitigate anger and to anticipate problems before they happen another the second two goals are pretty much primary for any kind of educational agency or a government agency, sorry, which is transparency and accountability. We don’t want people to think that we’re some like boogeyman that’s just marking up values so that we’re going to increase property tax bills. We also want people to feel like we are accessible, that they have a voice in what we do. We’re a little bit different from other government agencies in that a lot of other agencies you might have regular contact with, because you’re doing something regularly with them. We aren’t like that. Typically, a property owner will deal with us maybe once when they buy a new property and they’re just trying to make sure that everything’s taken care of, and they have to deal with their exemptions. But then they also might only deal with us in the protest process, and so a lot of times, the only contact that your standard property owner has with us is in a combative situation, right through, through the protest process, through an ARB hearing and that kind of a thing. And so that affects how people think of us. And a lot of times, you know, what they think of us and what they’re willing to give us credibility for.

So when we looked at that. We also looked at four different vehicles to try and kind of push forward these goals. Traditional media, which is your standard print, radio, TV, that kind of a thing. Print media, which is the the materials that we developed ourselves, that we make accessible on our website, we give to our customer service, we put in the mail. And so people are getting them in their in mailboxes, our regular outreach efforts, and then all of our online entities. So the website, the property search, feature some of those third party run configurations, and also social media. So I’m going to go through all four of these kind of things, just to kind of give you a roadmap of where we’re going, where we’ve been, which hopefully you can see the difference, and then where I want to make sure that we are taken in the next couple of years. So we’ll start with traditional media, which, like I said, is your print, your radio, your TV. And again, like I said, there was no internal infrastructure to handle reporter inquiries in this agency. And so what ended up happening was a lot of times these inquiries would go to customer service, or they might go to Marya or Leana directly. And obviously they’re very busy, and so if they don’t have time to handle those interviews and correct misinformation, then that ends up having an impact on what the final stories are that we ended up seeing in the news. These kinds of things were really big contributors to just the amount of misinformation that was out there about what we are, what we do, how we work, what people’s legal rights are, and how the processes are, but they also started to contribute to a pretty negative outlook on the agency, I think just people just didn’t know what we did. And how we did it. So we were just something that they got in the mail, some agency that sent them something in the mail every year that let them know that their property tax bill was going to be really big at the end of the year. So what we did was we focused on strengthening relationships, specifically with reporters. Pretty much every reporter that we have, a reporter at every outlet in Travis County that we work with, and all of them have my cell phone number. They can call me. They can text me whenever they want. I try to get back to them email wise within an hour. Sometimes things involve investigations, because sometimes they’re coming to us with a very specific problem about a specific property, and we have to do some investigation internally to figure out what’s going on and what we can do to fix it. And so Leana and Marya have been really great about helping me with that, carving time out of their busy schedules to help me look up a property and figure out where the problem is and how we can fix it, that kind of a thing. We have been proactive, and we have tried to educate people and reporters, by the way, because educating reporters is probably key to this whole thing, because a lot of a lot of people just don’t know how we work, and they think that they know, but they don’t. And so one of the things that we instituted, for example, was when a reporter wants to speak to Marya about something, before they can speak to Marya, I will probably have them on the phone for at least an hour, and I’m just kind of explaining everything to them, going through the assumptions that they’ve made, making sure those assumptions are correct, because sometimes they’re not. So that way, by the time they get to Marya, first, they’re not having a one hour conversation with Marya, but second, their questions are factually correct, and they kind of know that. Back story, we found that this has been a very good approach most of the time, and I say most of the time, because the fact of the matter is that a lot of reporters themselves are property owners, and so the idea that we are working free of bias in a lot of these situations just isn’t true. It can be very difficult to most recently, looking at some of those examples, it can be very difficult to navigate a conversation with a reporter in an unbiased manner when their market value just shot up 120% you know, those conversations can be difficult, to say the least. So we’ve tried our very best to be proactive, to let people know that we’re here, we’re available, specifically me, I’m here, I’m available. I will get back to you as quickly as I can. Now, this doesn’t mean that we just go willy nilly, and we answer every request, and we make Marya available,

just, you know, because someone asked for it, we do do a certain clearance process, you know, again, to make sure that people have the information that they need, but also that we aren’t put in a situation where there is kind of a hidden agenda, or we’re going to be caught off guard. Because I again, I do think that just history, the history of this agency and our relationships with the media and the depiction that we’ve had in the past has has allowed for some of that to happen sometimes. So again, we’ve taken steps to try and mitigate that and to try and make sure that things that are going out there are factual and are things we can help with. So looking at where we are, I went ahead and ran the data for just this year so far. So January, 1 through end of May, been in the media, the local media, 128 times, we’re at an 82% positivity rating. I essentially go through media and I rank it positive, negative or neutral. I think that’s actually really great number, because for those of you that were here beforehand, it was probably the 82% negative number. Would be my guess, 87% on message. You know, we want to make sure that something is factually correct and that the information that we want to get out there is being put out there and key topics that people talk to us about, it’s pretty standard, but property information, so a lot of times, especially the statesman or the Business Journal, when they’re reporting on some business deals that happen, they’ll include information about how we appraise a property recently to kind of compare it to what the sale looked like. Exemptions, appraisals and protests are always our big three, which are are spread out throughout the year. So we get a pretty good amount of media coverage spread out throughout the four quarters. As far as where we’re going on traditional media, we’re continuing to strengthen those relationships, continuing to educate reporters. Now that we have pretty much one really good, solid report at every media outlet, we can continue to make sure that at least one person in that media have outlet has a really good background on the property tax system, which, as you all know is very complicated and is easy to misconstrue. And so having that background of having one key ally everywhere that just knows the facts and how things work has been really helpful for us, and we’re going to continue to do that. My priority is obviously establishing our reputation as being reliable and accessible. I don’t want people to think that we are cut off from them. I don’t want people to think that they should be afraid of us, or that we’re evil or that we’re doing something bad or wrong or secretive or we don’t welcome the scrutiny. Send me the questions. I’ll answer the questions now, the basis of your question might be wrong, in which case we have to have a conversation. But again, I’m not refraining from those conversations and also continuing to educate the media and the public on the property tax system, which, as you all know, is complicated and people don’t like it. So that comes with its own problems. Then we’ll go to print, which, like I said, encompasses the things that we put together for property owners. You’ll find those in our offices, you’ll find those in our customer with our customer service reps. They use those a lot, but most often people have access to these because of the things that you get in the mail from us. So your notice of appraised value, a postcard that we send out, that kind of a thing. When I started here, one of the things that I noticed is that I barely understood anything that we had. And I think a really big problem with that that constrains appraisal districts, is that so often we are we are bound to legal language because the property tax code will say specifically what we have to say and how we have to say it. And a lot of times that language is not taxpayer friendly at all, not for your average person. And so when the law says you have to do this by saying A B and C, but I have no idea what a B or C mean, and it’s dependent on me understanding that as to whether I get my exemption or my protest is successful, or whatever, that creates a problem. And so the question then becomes, well, how do we work within those confines of what we know legally we have to do, but our obligations to everyday property owners. So one of the things that we did, and we are continuing to do, is we are continuing to look at these different forms of communications and these different these different items that we have to create and that we’ve created on our own, not because we have to, but because they do serve an important purpose in our customer relations strategy, and first redesigning them so that on its face, our items are attractive. They’re easy to navigate with your eye. Calls to action are very clearly easy to find. If we’re directing you to a URL, for example, for more information, those URLs are easy to type in. They’re not long complicated, that kind of a thing, and then also rewriting complicated language where the law allows for us to do so, sometimes the law says you have to say it exactly this way, and sometimes the law says you just have to make sure it says all of these things. And so I am constantly asking Marya and Leana when I can push boundaries on that. One of the things that we have taken on as an approach is, if the law says I have to say it this way, A, B and C, I’ll design something so that it says A, B and C, but in another section of that same design, I might have it rewritten a different way so that it is more understandable. So we are meeting the legal requirement, but at the same time, we are putting it in a way to where hopefully it is more understandable, and so we’re constantly looking at all of our communications, and I put a couple of examples in the presentation to show you how we’ve just kind of tried to standardize a look, a feel for the brand, but also making them attractive and making it easy to understand and clarifying the calls to action. One of the things that we just redesigned is the postcard for the truth in taxation website, which you all remember, was started a couple years ago, and so I put an example of the 2019, version of the postcard that gets sent out, I believe, in September, August ish, to every homeowner to let them know. Go to this website and you can see your information. The law had new requirements for us starting this year, so we redesigned the postcard based on those requirements. It now meets those requirements exactly, kind of gave it a new look, because it’s not supposed to look like it’s coming from the appraisal district. So we gave it a new look, and I believe we’re going to be making this accessible to other CADS across the state, because we know it meets legal requirements. We’re pretty confident that it’s understandable. It has a certain legitimacy to the look of it, which I think is another thing we don’t want to be sending people things that they throw away, because just based on the look, they look like they’re spam. So we’re going to be moving forward with that later on this year. So that’s the version that you all will be seeing in your mailboxes. As far as where we’re going again, we’re continuing to evaluate the materials that we have on both the stuff that we’ve created, and when does a purpose arise for some us to create something new? Because I think we’re finding a lot of times, especially with changes in the law that happen, that sometimes we do need to create something that clarifies what something means, or how something gets implemented in that kind of a thing, and also continuing to put all of those items into text that’s understandable for your average person. Which is probably the biggest, the biggest impediment to us in this whole process is, again, what does the law require us to say and how we say it? And again, identifying documents, continuing to identify documents that are redesigned, getting feedback on documents that we’ve already redesigned, if we need to make adjustments to those kinds of things and just really letting the data tell us the story. So then we’ll also look at Outreach. Where we were. We were doing very limited in person engagement at the time. Essentially, the process was, if you wanted us to talk to you to do a presentation, you contacted the taxpayer liaison, or you contacted Marya directly. We fit you in the schedule she’d show up. And Marya likes to talk about how she would typically show up, and there might be two or three people there. And so I think a really big question for that was, how do we reach as many people as possible, utilizing our resources as best as possible, right? Because I want Marya to meet with every single property owner in Travis County, but she doesn’t have the time for that. So where can I put her, and how can I use her in a way to where a majority of people, or most people, can easily find her? And so we, we took a couple of approaches to this. The biggest one was that we prived to online outreach and COVID kind of forced our hand on this a lot, but we moved to a zoom webinar format, and what that allowed us to do was it allowed us to advertise to people who could sit from any anywhere, and they could watch us. But it also allowed us to record those presentations and to post them online so people couldn’t be there or people had questions two months down the line, they could go back and they could watch those videos. Another helpful thing about this was that we were easily able to keep track of what kind of questions people had and what were they missing, and what were they misunderstanding. And so that was another data point that we were able to get from these situations to where we could then use to inform other outreach that we were doing. Do you have a question? Okay?

And then we also worked on developing influencer lists. And so, you know, there’s, there’s a certain amount of work that we can do, but I think what we found was that there are people weren’t prone to seeing us necessarily as the best resource for information about exemptions or protests, which seems weird, right? But there actually is a reason for that, which I’ll get into in the online section. But what we found there was then that people would often go to their realtor, or if they already had a tax agent or a lawyer, they were often asking those folks for this information. And so if these people had incorrect information, it just funneled down the line, and it created some really big problems for us, right? Because one realtor gets it wrong, and they work at a big agency, then 100 Realtors get it wrong, and then we have 2000 property owners that are angry because they were told it works one way, and then when we finally did the process, that’s not the way it worked. So we worked hard to develop influencer lists that include not only realtors, but elected officials and HOAs here in Travis County, so that we can easily send an email and just be like, Hey, here’s some resources. Here are the webinars we’re doing. Here’s this new page on the website we’ve set up. Here are some social media posts. Here are some images that you can use, and what we find is that people use them. HOAs will send out emails that promote our webinars. Elected officials will post on their social media or in their newsletters, using our images and using the information that we have. It becomes a really great way just to kind of funnel information through and to get more people, more important people, more people that are considered reliable and trustworthy to know our information. So this year, looking at it, our online webinars have reached more than 26,000 people, and that includes both in initially, people that attend the webinars themselves, and then people that watch some portion of the webinar later, through various means, that kind of thing. It also includes people that have signed up for webinar at some point and continue to come back to us. That kind of a thing. We had six outreach events in May. Three of them were online. Three of them were in person during COVID. We did not do any in person events, so everything was very much heavily online. However, over the last two months, we’ve started to notice that we have groups that are starting to reach out to us again about in person outreach, and so we’re starting to do the in person events again. And obviously, as you all will remember, if you were here at that time last year, we did win the I double award for public outreach efforts because of the way that we were able to pivot in COVID and the way we have been able to use our online resources to reach people. And so where we’re going right now, a lot of our outreach. Which resolves revolves heavily on Marya and Marya ‘sschedule, and if Marya can do it, then she’s there. And if not, well, that’s the problem. So one of the things that that I have talked to Marya about is just identifying other staff members in a leadership pipeline that we can train who want to work on these skills, and who we know are reliable horse voices, so that we can have more than just Marya available. So Marya can’t make it. It’s not a no. But also, you know, the more people we have, the more things that we can be doing at one time. So identifying and training staff as appropriate spokespeople is a really big priority for me this year. I’m also reconnecting with groups for in person outreach. Like I said, COVID kind of killed all that for us for a while, and so we’re starting to revamp it up. But that also means that I had two and a half years where I wasn’t building relationships with people so that I could say, like, hey, we’ll get our chief appraiser out there to do that kind of a thing, and especially, even more, continuing to build on those influencer relationships, because we find that those are really, really key. People aren’t prone to trust us just because we’re a government agency, but they are more likely to trust their realtor or their neighbor friend who’s a real estate attorney, that kind of a thing. So knowing that those people have the information is really important. And finally, so now we’re going to go to where we are online. So online was a little bit of a frustration for me, because those of you that remember what our website looked like seven months ago know that it wasn’t the most attractive piece of online stationary there was, but it was also very jilted. I don’t think when it was developed, that it was developed with a strategy in mind, as in, this is how someone will navigate this piece of property. I think it was developed as in, we have all of this information. How do we put put it on there? And that creates a significant problem in that the information might be on there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean someone can find it, right? And so what good is it if no one can find it? So one of the we did a couple of different things, we established active social media presences with paid opportunities. We do occasionally do paid media, especially when we’re talking about deadlines, especially when we’re talking about webinars. Will we will target people in Travis County, people that have visited our website, people that have demographic information that shows that they are most likely a new homeowner. And we will say, Hey, we’re here. We’re doing this. Come hang out with us and learn some more. We also launched the new website in December, which has been doing really, really well, which I’ll also get to in a little bit, because I included a few stats for you. But essentially, where we are is is our priority is to make the information easier to access and easier to understand. It is also to establish TCAD as a primary resource for this information. So you know, if you’re looking for information on exemptions or protests, you should know that the appraisal district is the agency that handles that, and so for the best information, you should go to the agency’s website. What we found was that wasn’t necessarily happening. A lot of times people would be Googling these terms, and tcads website would not show up anywhere on the first page of those results. And so people were getting their information about exemptions from other entities, and a lot of times that information wasn’t accurate or wasn’t updated. And so again, that’s another way that we started to see things just weren’t turning out for us. The new website is also very Google friendly. We continue to evaluate what resources we need to put up there, continuing to try to automate things. If there are new forms that we can create so that a property owner can fill it out themselves and give us that information very quickly, and we can put it in a format that our staff can handle it much easier. That’s exactly what we’re doing. If there’s information we can put in there so that homeowners can figure out their own calculations and kind of understand how the system works. That’s what we’re doing. That includes continually updating our text looking at video resources and also the webinars. And so, like I said, I put some stats up there on what the what the new website has done. And so what I did was I compared January to May of last year to January to May of this year. And I did that because essentially, you know, we work on a seasonal calendar, and so that’s the best way to kind of compare when people are looking for information for exemptions, people looking at information for protests and that kind of a thing. And our four main pages on the website that always get the most traffic, which are our homepage, the exemptions page, the protest page and the property search page, you can see all saw significant increases in traffic between this year and last year, and that just shows me that the information is becoming easier to find. Which is what I want. I want people again knowing that we are the resource for all of this, and if they have questions. Are the ones that they should come to for answers. But it also shows just the usability of the website, I think, is just a lot better. And again, we continue to look at the data to see where we can continue to push things forward, what we need to change, what information needs to go on there. So in terms of where we’re going, we are going to continue to live stream board meetings. We have a new system that we were hoping to debut to your Oohs and awes today, but we had some technical difficulties, but you’ll see we’ve installed cameras. There’s one here in the back, there’s one there in the corner. You see that big rack there in the back of the room, which is the system. It’s going to be a really nice system. It’s the same system that the city of Austin uses to broadcast their board meetings, and so it’s a high quality, good audio kind of thing. And unfortunately, we were having technical difficulties today, so we weren’t able to do that. We will also be refitting this entire room with new audio equipment, so there will be a new audio system that will make it easier to hear over this air conditioner, especially that will pick up your voices much more easily, and that will translate into this system, so it should improve the experience, both in the room and for people that are watching us outside. We are going to continually identify new website content. I’m also looking at the accessibility issues of the website, not just in terms of people who maybe have a disability of some sort, and how they are able to interpret the website, but I want to make sure that as we are continuing to move things online, that we’re not leaving behind a generation that maybe doesn’t have that access or isn’t as tech savvy, right? Because we need to continue to make sure that those people have access to resources as well,

continuing to battle misinformation. I think that’s a really big problem. That’s probably one of the biggest issues that I have online right now. I spoke a little bit about realtors and kind of sometimes when they don’t have the most accurate information. But I think another issue that we’re seeing is companies that are trying to come into the property tax business space, and we do have leaders in that space, in this market, and so when you companies try to come in and into that space and assert themselves, what we’re seeing is that a lot of them will put up a lot of website content, they’ll put up blog posts, they’ll do social media posts, they’ll do social media ads, and they don’t know how we run things. And so a lot of times those things don’t have correct information on them. And so how do we kind of make sure, again, that people know that we’re the primary resource for those things and then we can somehow fix it. Another big thing is redesigning Travis taxes.com the truth in taxation website. It did get redesigned a little bit last year. We did not have any influence on those changes, and I wasn’t too happy with it. I didn’t think it was very understandable for your standard property owner, but we are working with the vendor to redesign that in a way, to where very dense information, I think, is taking a step forward and how understandable it is. So again, we’ll continue to do that. A couple other things I just want to mention. It was brought up. It’s been brought up a few times in the board meetings that I’ve attended since I started working here, but the idea of a board contact, we did set up a standardized email it’s bod at TCAD central.org, we have listed in on the website. So if people, in theory, want to contact the board, they can what we have decided to do. Leanna and I talked about it. We talked about the dangers of that email address being overrun with information that really needs to be handled by customer service or the taxpayer liaison or maybe even one of our appraisers. And so right now, that inbox is set up to where those emails will be filtered. And so if it’s something that should go to the board, it will go to the board. If it’s something that really is a customer service or taxpayer liaison or other department issue, it gets forwarded that way, and so that’s how we’re managing that. Finally, I just wanted to include some information on the lovely April event that kept us busy, which was when we released our values. Our website went down and it went down, and it went down in a lovely, lovely fashion. And we eventually, after several hours, found out that it was a coordinated attack against the website. And I put some facts up. We had a we have a third party provider that provides our server infrastructure. And it took them a couple hours to figure this out, because at first, we kind of thought it was just people accessing the website, looking for their values, right? We expected that spike. The website should have been able to handle that spike. It shouldn’t have been a problem. What we ended up finding out from that third party server is that we had about 12,000 IP addresses trying to access the website at a single every second. Date, and that’s the typical traffic for a standard day, an uneventful day. So we were getting that every second it was they just did not have the capacity to handle that. And from what I understand, it’s very unlikely that anyone would have the capacity to handle that kind of demand. They also let us know that for at every second, at every moment, there was a record or a usage request of about 70 gigabytes of bandwidth on our website, and I put a stat down there, that we typically use 12.3 gigabytes of bandwidth in a day, in a 24 hour period. So that just kind of shows you how exponential the demand was and how large the attack was when it happened. We again, initially, we attributed it to property owners and people struggling, trying to find out, then their that information. And so we put that out there. You know, we due to an increase in traffic, you may have problems accessing the website once our provider was able to clarify what the situation was, and they tried to take steps to mitigate it, and it wasn’t enough. We did put out another statement that clarified that, no, this is an attack, and we’re doing our best. We did end up moving to another provider that just is set up in a much better way to handle these kinds of things. It took us about 36 hours to make that switch, and the impact was immediate. The attack got squashed pretty quickly thanks to the new tools that we had at our disposal, and the website has been functional and stable ever since. There is evidence that there are still some funny things that are trying to come in. But like I said, the new provider has set us up so that we we continue to function the way that we need to function. So that was a really great 36 hours with our it, folks, but that’s pretty much what I got. So open to any comments, questions, concerns.

So, um, the provider that we originally were with when the attack started, I think, wanted to kind of limit the information we had for their own security reasons, because the actions that they would normally take weren’t enough, and so the attack was so big that I think it scared them a little bit, to be honest with you. I think they took some actions hoping we were going to find another provider, because they got a little scared about helping us out there so they limited what we learned with the new provider, we have a little bit more data. I can’t tell you specifically. I can’t give you a whole lot, mostly because, again, they also have their own safeguards to protect themselves and to protect us. But what I can tell you is that I’ve seen a mix of international and domestic IP addresses that it could be attributed to, and they did, they did block a lot of IP addresses that are known for being malicious, that are known for being employed for this kind of attack. And even then, that wasn’t enough. I

um, well, they get all of us it. I do believe it was very intentional. The values actually went up April 14. In the evening, the site was stable. People were starting to share on social media, on Reddit, like, hey, the new properties are up. Everything was fine. I usually have Google Analytics up in the background pretty much every day, so I can kind of see traffic ebb and flow, and I’m watching where people are going and where they’re coming from, that kind of a thing. And it just, I mean, it wasn’t even like a gradual climb on the morning of the 15th, it just all of a sudden, just shut down. The site, just shut down. Yeah, and that was what most people thought,

Yes, we do, we do. Yes, we do. We so a lot of times, people will contact us on social, or they will talk about us on social, and I think they they want a customer service type response. We do not provide customer service on social, but what we will tell people is we can give them basic information, sometimes that they have a request, if it is very specific to their property. We will tell people to contact customer service. I might reach out to a customer service agent specifically and say, hey, look into this, because there are some questions about it. There are some times where we will flag issues. I will flag issues based on what I’ve seen. Like, hey, a lot of people are saying they have this problem, or this property owner is saying they have this problem. And there. Are tweeting at the statesman or at K view. I want to know what’s going on before it gets out of hand. So that’s that’s an everyday thing. That’s another one of those things that’s always up on my computer.

James Valadez 1:25:17
I just want to say, thank you so much for being here and doing all that you do, you’re invaluable to the board and to the district. So,

Cynthia Martinez 1:25:26
all right, thank you.

Bruce Elfant 1:25:27
As one of the people who has been around a while, I think this is a great change. I think before you, most of the white hairs that Marya got was because of media and Yeah, and so I think this is a great change. It’s so much more organized and intentional the way you’re going about it.

Cynthia Martinez 1:25:46
We try and and we’re not where I want us to be yet, but I think I do have to mitigate my expectations of the fact that we’re a part of the property tax system, and people are not gonna like us to some extent, but we’re getting there. So

James Valadez 1:26:06
Thank you, Cynthia. We’ll move on to the next item on our agenda, which is 5j discussion of possible action on conveyance of real property.

Marya Crigler 1:26:19
And we’ll probably need to go into Executive Session j and l,

James Valadez 1:26:25
j, k and l.

Marya Crigler 1:26:28
We don’t have anything for K, such as J and L, okay,

James Valadez 1:26:34
So the Board may meet an executive session to deliberate any matter authorized by the Texas Government Code, Section 55101, Texas Open Meeting Act, including section 551071, consultation with attorney regarding pending contemplated litigation, settlement offers and matters of which the attorney may have a duty to advise the board under the Texas disciplinary rules and professional conduct of the State Bar of Texas. In addition section 551072, deliberations regarding real property. The board will now stand adjourned at 12:12, and go into Executive Session.

The time is 2:28, on June 7, 2022 and we are back from executive session and restarting the regularly scheduled meeting of the Travis Central Appraisal District Board of Directors. The item that we have before us now is item 5j discussion and possible action on conveyance of real property. Is there any motion on that or discussion?

Theresa Bastian 1:27:54
I move that we accept the offer as presented in Executive Session?

James Valadez 1:27:59
Okay, that has been moved by Miss Bastian

Theresa Bastian 1:28:10
Clarification. Then

I’ll adapt mend my motion to say to move forward with the letter of intent as presented in Executive Session.

James Valadez 1:28:37
Okay, that’s been moved by Miss Bastian and seconded by Mr. Buckle. Is there any further discussion on that item? Hearing, none. Let’s take a vote. All those in favor, All those opposed. That motion passes unanimously. We will move on to Item 5k.

5l. Oh. 5l of our regular agenda, discussion, possible approval, confirming prior authorization of chief appraiser to appeal the Appraisal Review Board’s order determining the protest for PID 352532, for tax year, 2019, so

Okay, that has been moved by Miss Blanca Garcia. Is there a second to that motion? Okay, that has been seconded by Miss Debbie Cartwright. Any further discussion on that item?

We appreciate that recusal and that forthright nature. Any further discussion on that item? Okay, hearing none. Let’s take a vote all those in favor, All those opposed. That motion passes unanimously, with Mr. Tom Buckle abstaining.

Tom Buckle abstaining,

We will move on to Item 5m of our just of our regular agenda discussion and possible action to add items to future agendas. Does anyone have any items they’d like to see appear on our next meeting. Okay? Ms Cartwright is querying about a training session, and so we’ll see if we can’t get that on, maybe for next quarter.

Marya Crigler 1:30:53
Yeah, we’ll try to reschedule that for maybe a September meeting. I think we won’t. We will be swamped in July, so I request that we not have a board meeting in July, but we may, may be able to do something in August. We’ll need to do something before September 15, which is when we have to do our approval of our final budget, and we have to do a public hearing at that time. So before September 15, but I would ask for maybe late August for the next meeting.

James Valadez 1:31:24
Any other items? I do, like the the ARB Chairman coming up and giving that specifically through protests use, and I think is, is always nice, and like to see that continue.

Any other items? Okay? At 2:33, on June 7, 2022, the Travis Central Appraisal District Board of Directors stands adjourned.

Marya Crigler 1:32:02
Thank you guys.