ADEL — Monday was the first working day for clerks in the office of the Dallas County Assessor in their new office space at 121 N. Ninth St. on the courthouse square.
Contractors in June began an extensive remodeling of the office space formerly filled by the Dallas County Supervisors, the Dallas County Human Resources Department, Dallas County Environmental Health Department and Dallas County Office of Emergency Management.
Dallas County Assessor Steve Helm, still unpacking boxes and stocking his desk, said he is glad to have more room. He said his 12-person staff can function efficiently in the 2,900-square-foot rooms, “and we can add two people comfortably.”
The explosive rate of property development in Dallas County means Helm will need more staff in the near future.
Helm joined the assessor’s office in 1997 as a clerk under former Dallas County Assessor Ronald Potter, who held the office from 1979 to 2003, when Helm became the assessor.
When he started, Helm said, the eight-person assessor’s staff filled 1,200 square feet in the northwest corner of the ground floor of the courthouse. The assessor then occupied temporary trailers for about three years, beginning in 2005, while the courthouse was restored.
“There were 10 of us in 780 square feet,” Helm said. “That was difficult.”
Once they returned to the courthouse, their second-floor offices were 1,600 square feet, but the steady growth in the workload has meant chronic tightness that the move out of the courthouse relieves.
Similarly, the Dallas County auditor’s office on the courthouse’s second floor was vacated earlier this year. The numerous services of the auditor’s office, from elections to accounting- and real estate-related services, are now centralized at 210 N. 10th St. The removal of the assessor leaves only the offices of the county record and county treasurer on the second floor of the courthouse.
Technology has changed much about the assessor’s job, Helm said.
“We don’t see the public that much other than when tax statements go out and when assessment notices come out,” Helm said, “but Homestead and pretty much everything else is online for you. Most people do it online, so you don’t see as much of the public anymore. We certainly don’t see the appraisers and the realtors. We’ve been online now for so long that they’ve all got used to it, and you just don’t see them.”
Helm witnessed the assessor’s office make the technology transition, and he had a hand in promoting it.
“I pushed big to get out on the internet. The year prior to us going online, we made about $35,000 in fax and copy fees,” he said with a laugh in retrospect. “Basically, we were paying one person to do that all day. That’s all they did was fax and copies. So the internet’s been really nice. Every appraiser and banker and insurance agent uses our records, so the change has be huge.”
Helm’s budget, like all county assessors’, is set by the tax levy rate, which is determined by the Assessor’s Conference Board, a committee of city, school and county officials. New commercial property held in tax increment financing (TIF) districts is assessed, but the assessor’s office receives tax money only on the unimproved land. Developers pay for improvements, such as roads or sewers, on the property in TIF districts.
Developers also pay property taxes, but they are refunded the tax amount paid on the increased property value until the costs of the improvements are repaid. Once the TIF district accomplishes this bootstrapping goal, the full assessed tax value then goes to the taxing bodies, the schools, cities, county and so forth.
The previous assessor, Ron Potter, told Des Moines Register reporter Thomas Beaumont in 2000, “I literally don’t have enough space for more staff.” For the first time in two decades, the Dallas County Assessor has no grounds for that complaint.
