A company that provides county governments help with commercial appraising has been hired to help the Cowley County Appraiser’s Office, which has not had a commercial appraiser on staff since the former appraiser died unexpectedly nine months ago.
McCully and Associates has been providing the county with commercial analysis studies for several years, and then this spring provided additional help after Greg Kent’s death. He was the only commercial appraiser in the office.
The job opening is being advertised and applications being accepted but qualified, trained employees in the field are hard to find, according to Treasurer Theresa Waite.
“It is a problem that other counties are encountering also,” she said.
William McCully of McCully and Associates said staffing issues are not only a problem for the counties but for him as well. “It is getting more difficult for McCully and Associates to contract for additional services late in the appraisal cycle.
“Qualified, temporary employees are impossible to find and, as you know, the work load is tremendous,” McCully said in a letter to Waite.
Cowley County has approximately 20,500 parcels of real estate with 10 employees in the appraiser’s office. Ideally, twelve or more employees could be used for that amount of work.
“But it’s difficult to find people trained to do the work,” Waite said. “If we hire people not trained, it takes a lot of time to train and take the classes needed to learn how to do the work we are doing.”
It’s taken since Kent’s death to define the position and expectations with the staff available.
“There is a lot involved. It entails a lot of things – not only data collections but verifying sales, doing sales reviews, income and expenses, depreciation, cost studies and capitalization rate studies,” she said. “A commercial appraiser for the most part in our county is a full-time job.”
Waite would like someone with experience in mass appraisals who has worked with either county or state government work in appraisals, and hopes applications begin to come in soon. Then the resumes will be reviewed and candidates interviewed. The salary will depend largely on qualifications and training although a salary range has been established with the low end set at $32,500 and the $40,000 the top.
In the meantime, McCully’s firm is already contracted for $12,700 to help with the county’s 2008 commercial valuation.
“January 1, there will be a new set of deadlines,” Waite said. “There is just a lot of work that goes on.”