Duval County, a picturesque area located in the northeast region of Florida, is home to the City of Jacksonville - the largest city in the contiguous United States in land area, covering 841 square miles. Jacksonville surrounds both banks of the St. Johns River, the state’s longest river, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean about 20 miles from downtown. The city’s deep-water port is the 14th largest in the U.S. and handles shipments from around the globe. Jacksonville is also well known for its insurance and financial industry. A rapidly growing region, the area’s population has increased steadily over the last ten years.
The Honorable Mike Hogan was elected as Duval County’s Tax Collector in July of 2003 and recognized quickly that there was a need to update the county’s tax collection system. The current system was a 30+ year old, mainframe-based system. Although it was familiar to users, it provided many challenges due to the age of its technology. The in-house system required continuous fixes and took hours to modify, update and repair. In addition, this system did not store the history of each parcel and in order to gather this information, many man hours were required.
In 1968, the City of Jacksonville and Duval County merged, creating a single entity governing all of Duval County. As a result, the county Tax Collector has the responsibility of collecting additional City fees such as parking fines and zoning permit fees. This additional revenue stream puts total collections for Mr. Hogan’s office to over $2 billion per year. At the time of the merge, each separate collection was on a different system and Mr. Hogan desired to consolidate all of these different collections to operate within one single data management solution.
Mr. Hogan and his staff discussed various thoughts regarding purchasing a new system versus building another in-house system. Ultimately, the decision to buy was pursued based on timing – the county was eager to implement a new solution quickly and realized the challenges involved in building an in-house system created a long implementation process. The County went to RFP in the spring of 2004.
After a rigorous procurement process, Mr. Hogan and his staff chose Manatron as its tax solution and signed a contract in February of 2005. “It became abundantly clear, throughout a very disciplined and comprehensive selection process, that only Manatron had the expertise and ability to meet both our current and future needs,” Hogan commented. “In addition, Manatron shared our vision for the complete integration of our tax management systems. Implementation of the Manatron Tax system will enable our office to serve the needs of our taxpayers and property owners more accurately, efficiently and cost effectively.”
Implementation began immediately and the County was up and running on Manatron Tax in the fall of 2005. Due to limited internal IT resources at the County, Mr. Hogan relied on Manatron staff to carry the burden during data conversion and throughout the implementation.
“It was certainly worth the time and effort to go through the entire RFP and procurement process,” Scott Amos, Deputy Tax Collector commented. “We were able to solidify the final decision to choose Manatron. We were confident that with their history of proven performance in Florida coupled with the experienced personnel they have on board, Manatron would be able to handle our complex collection process and any new challenges that may face us in the future.”
As a result of the installation of Manatron Tax and the integration of the separate collection systems, Mr. Hogan and his staff are now able to more effectively serve the citizens of Duval County. The reduction in time has allowed the office to become more efficient and productive.
In addition to the purchase of Manatron Tax, Mr. Hogan and his staff utilized LienPro, Manatron’s Internet tax sale solution, to perform its tax lien certificate auctions in the spring of 2006 with great success. The Internet tax sale took only one day as opposed to the week-long sales of the past which were conducted live by the Tax Collector’s personnel. Scott Amos added, “This new online method freed up many hours of personnel time not only conducting the auction, but in preparation time as well.”
“The man hours saved through using Manatron’s solution have been a great advantage for our office. Our staff is now able to focus on and devote their time to other projects that previously they had limited time to perform,” said Amos. “The Manatron solution automates many tax processing functions that had been manually processed for many years.”