Lynchburg, Virginia is a city of 50 square miles located near the geographic center of the state, bordered by the eastern edge of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. It is located approximately 180 miles southwest of the nation's capital, Washington, D.C.
On March 5, 2001, the City Manager appointed Mr. Gregory H. Daniels, CAE as the new City of Lynchburg Assessor. Upon arriving at the City of Lynchburg, Mr. Daniels quickly realized the need for a new CAMA system.
The old CAMA system had no ability to total the values assigned to land and improvement – meaning there was no check on the manual sum that the appraisers entered. The system did not store property sale history information, such as former property owners’ names and past sale price information. In order to retain that information, the administrative staff maintained property record cards for each parcel of land in the City. The cards included sales history information, valuation history information, and building sketches. These dual systems required duplicate data entry by the administrative staff, as well as the appraisers
The biggest deficiency of the old system was the lack of any analysis tools. The appraisers found it hard to maintain valuation consistency in their designated areas of the City. This caused property values to vary widely from one house to another and made it hard to defend assessments appealed to the City Assessor or to the Board of Equalization.
In 2001, a Request for Proposals (RFP) was issued to solicit vendors for a new system. After narrowing down the list of responses and evaluating several demonstrations, Manatron CAMA was selected as the City’s new CAMA system.
Manatron CAMA was implemented in the Microsoft SQL Server database management system and the City’s GIS, Intergraph’s GeoMedia, was implemented in Oracle. City Assessor Greg Daniels assumed responsibility for appraisal characteristics data conversion from the legacy CAMA system, saving the City the expense of a costly implementation task. Daniels’ aggressive implementation plan produced new assessments in Manatron CAMA less than nine months from the execution date of the City’s software acquisition contract.
After quickly implementing the basic appraisal software capabilities, Daniels realized that integration with GIS and other systems would yield additional benefits for the City of Lynchburg. He initiated a project to integrate building permit management using the parcel fabric in GeoMedia. The new building permit management system required that the parcel to actually exist in the GIS and in Manatron CAMA before a permit could be issued, solving one of the traditional problems associated with stand-alone permitting systems. As permits are issued they become available for use by the assessor’s office for new construction tracking.
Because of the flexibility of Intergraph’s GeoMedia system, the City of Lynchburg has been able to make very effective use of the “parcel set” feature within Manatron CAMA. Used together, they join the spatial data from Oracle in the GeoMedia application with the MS SQL database and perform spatial overlays in GeoMedia. This produces result sets that output to Manatron CAMA’s parcel set table, which is used to update the appraisal database. For example, the assessor’s office has been able to use GeoMedia to validate and refine assessment neighborhoods. Spatially viewing the neighborhoods allows anomalies to be clearly seen. Corrections, realignments and refinement of the City’s assessment neighborhoods become simple when parcel sets are created and processed automatically to update the appraisal database using appraisal system batch processes.
In addition, appraisal data can be searched using tools such as Crystal Report Writer to create lists of parcels for spatial viewing in GeoMedia.
Since 2001, many changes have occurred in the City of Lynchburg Assessor’s Office. The introduction of a new CAMA system eliminated much of the duplicate work being performed by the administrative and appraisal staff. With a more efficient CAMA system in place, the City Assessor was able to look more closely at other workflow processes and systems to investigate what could be done more efficiently and more consistently, while raising the level of customer service to the public. Manual processes and systems, such as the property card system, needed to be replaced. Consistency needed to be made a priority both administratively and in property valuation. Technology needed to be utilized to effectively analyze data and simplify workflow, beginning with the new CAMA system.
From this scrutiny came changes to the Lynchburg City Code, the development of standard operating procedures to promote consistency and effective cross-training of staff and the introduction of new technology tools, such as GeoMedia, WebMap and Crystal Reports to increase staff productivity and to perform statistical analysis of data. These changes have streamlined workflow in the City Assessor’s Office and reduced the manual processes that were prominent for so long.
“With more efficient systems and processes in place, the City Assessor’s Office has been able to improve the quality and administration of property valuation and assessment in the City of Lynchburg. Our staff is encouraged to continue developing professionally and to challenge obsolete processes and recommend changes to increase efficiency and/or quality of work,” concluded Daniels. “Improvement is a continuing process and the City of Lynchburg Assessor’s Office will continue to strive for innovative ways to effectively administer property assessment and property tax policies.”
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