Assessor Hopes To Bring Tax Mapping Into The Digital Age

By Andrew Gorosko

The town assessor has submitted a $150,000 budget funding request for the 2000-2001 fiscal year to start work on a multi-year project to convert the town’s property tax assessment system from paper-based files to digital files.

As part of the project, the aerial photography which the town uses for its real estate tax mapping would be available in digital form for computer use, as well as on paper.

The large blueprinted aerial photos the town now uses as its tax mapping are based on a photographic fly-over of the town done in the 1970s and have outlived their usefulness, said Assessor Denise Hames. “The maps we are using are antiquated,” she said Tuesday.

To gather photographic information for the planned new computer-based tax assessment system, the town had Golden Aerial Surveys, Inc, a Hawleyville photogrammetry firm, perform photographic fly-overs of the town in the spring of 1998, Ms Hames said. That project included painting symbols on roadways throughout town to provide visual reference points for the aerial photography. Such photographic flyovers are done midday on a clear spring day, after snows have melted, but before foliage has emerged, to provide maximum ground detail, and thus maximum tax-related information, on the reconnaissance.

Ms Hames said the assessment department had requested $150,000 in funding for the tax mapping project last year for the 1999-2000 fiscal year, but that budget request was denied.

Receiving the $150,000 would allow the town to begin adapting the photographic images obtained by Golden Aerial for the town’s tax mapping purposes, Ms Hames said. So far, the 9-inch by 9-inch photographic negatives have been used to make photographic contact prints for the town. The next step in the process is correcting the distortion inherent in the aerial photography to provide the photos with a usable, accurate scale.

GIS Mapping

The conversion of the town’s tax assessment system, which will take up to five years, will form the backbone of the town’s Geographic Information System (GIS). GIS is a computerized data storage, manipulation and retrieval system.

The assessment department’s portion of the GIS is expected to cost $600,000 to $700,000 overall, Ms Hames said.

GIS mapping includes electronic “layers” of information, viewable on a computer monitor, which can be added or subtracted, as needed, to depict various types of information.

In the assessment department, workers plan to include information on property boundaries, zoning lines and topographic contours on the electronic maps. Each property depicted on the electronic mapping will be linked to its electronic tax assessment file, which is viewed on a computer screen. The assessment files contain information including property ownership, square footages, acreage, and available public utilities, plus land record references, Ms Hames said.

The new tax mapping system will allow the town to keep more accurate real estate records, she said. “It will serve the public much better” by generating a more accurate tax base, she said. Creating a paper-based version of the tax mapping will be the last phase of the town’s revamped tax assessment records system.

The new system will document the significant growth which occurred in Newtown during the 1990s. The Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) approved 1,516 new house lots from 1990 through November 1999. The town issued 1,785 building permits for new houses. Residential development occurred on 6,328 acres. Residential development resulted in 44 new streets.

Besides the assessment department, other town departments, such as the school system and highway department, could create electronic layers of GIS information useful to them, such as school bus routes and the location of drainage catch basins, respectively, Ms Hames said.

In August 1998, the Housatonic Valley Council of Elected Officials (HVCEO) helped Newtown enter initial data into a GIS system now kept at the town land use office in Canaan House at Fairfield Hills. A planning intern later added more layers of data into that GIS database.

A GIS system is used by planners to store information on roads, railroads, brooks, ponds, wetlands, open space, trails, sewers, public utilities, industrial development, and land use zones among other data. A GIS base map of the town generated by the land use department’s computer system is on display at the town conservation office.

GIS mapping can be used by every department in a municipality which stores information which can be keyed to geographic locations, such as street addresses, or lines of latitude and longitude.