Assessing contractor Josh Berry previews Power BI dashboard to help city meet July 1 commitment

Josh Berry, an assessing contractor with Municipal Consulting Group, presented a new Power BI dashboard to the Finance Committee and said the tool will compile parcel-level data for the entire city to support the July 1 assessment commitment and budget planning.

Berry said the dashboard "takes all 9,006 parcels in Ellsworth and puts it all into 1 place," enabling staff and council members to slice data by neighborhood, land-use code and building type and to link directly to underlying property records. He described charts tying together taxable value, the tax levy and the mill rate so officials can see how valuation changes affect residents' tax bills.

Why it matters: The dashboard is intended to improve transparency for residents and give staff an early view of valuation trends so the city can make more precise adjustments rather than conducting disruptive, citywide revaluations. Berry said the tool will also help the city prepare communications for residents about likely mill-rate effects.

Key details from the presentation included a cited 15.66% jump in taxable value in 2023 and a corresponding 12.92% drop in the mill rate to $15.70 in the example Berry showed; he described the dashboard's ability to run sales-ratio analyses and to display the coefficient of dispersion (COD), a statistic Maine Revenue uses to judge assessment consistency. Berry said the dashboard will distinguish qualified sales from outliers and let staff trace large percent changes to abatements, depreciation or new permits.

Berry also described a planned mobile-inspector workflow to capture new-construction permit data in the field and enter it directly, which staff said will help differentiate value added by new construction from general market appreciation. He showed cost tables for building types (for example, town hall at $110 per square foot and a single-family ranch around $105 per square foot) and said those inputs let staff make finer adjustments without a wholesale revaluation.

On public release, Berry told the committee he can build a public-facing view, but he and staff agreed it would be better to finalize internal data quality and the commitment first. "We may not want this publicly facing just yet," Berry said, adding the goal is to avoid publishing information that could cause confusion while the dataset is still being validated. The chair and staff discussed scheduling a council workshop so the full council can preview the tool.

The committee also discussed staffing: Sarah said the assessing assistant position has been offered to a candidate who will split time between assessing, code and planning and should start by month-end; staff described that hire as a backfill rather than a new position.

Next steps: Berry and staff will continue data cleanup and work toward the July 1 commitment; the committee scheduled a budget workshop for Thursday at 6:00 p.m. to review external-organization requests and related budget items.