First the annual Shelby County Trustee PILOT report is an invaluable authoritative data source for which the Shelby County Trustee’s office should be commended. As a data source, it provides taxpayers with a County wide view of payment-in-lieu of taxes (PILOTs) programming. Without the report, taxpayers are blind.
The report is produced by the Trustee’s office originally in Excel and then converted to PDF for web based publication. Commercially available software allows taxpayers the ability to convert the report back to its original Excel spreadsheet version which is what I did with the report in December. For research and analytical purposes, Excel allows users to sort and perform calculations.
But for some reason, a newly posted 2018 Trustee PDF report no longer allows the user to convert to Excel. This obstructs taxpayer analysis and results in the user having to transcribe over 10,000 fields to Excel which would take a community researcher some 4-6 months. Its my guess the file conversion was authored within the bowels of County government and not by the Trustee Administration. My experience with the compromised data source can be seen in the video above.
The Trustee staff has always been helpful and transparent with my requests but I wanted the community to know of the type of manipulations that routinely occur somehow that obstruct transparency and inquiry.
Its the type of obstruction the local elitist would in fact support. After all, the community is disconnected from reality on several fronts while blind to the total amount of total annual tax incentives occurring throughout Shelby County and its municipalities. Excel allows for estimates to be made through calculations as many of the abating boards do not publish anything that would accommodate a global Shelby County view of tax incentives.
Further, the elitist have authored bogus accounting for 8 years with EDGE to justify excessive incentives for the small few while bothcing the workforce development system and administering MWBE programming seemingly to benefit highly established and in some cases affluent companies. Given this pattern of behavior by the elitist, this obstruction is the type the elitists would author to disconnect the community from reality in knowing an estimated total of excessive corporate/real estate incentive amounts.
Solution
Given this obstruction, the following specification is being requested for the 2019 Annual Shelby County Trustee PILOT report.
Publicly downloadable and user unprotected 2019 Trustee PILOT report with individual fields populated in Excel
Fields – PILOT Owner, Property Owner, Abating Board, Board Parcel Number, County Parcel Number, Begin Date, End Date, Assessment Taxes, Contract Taxes, Difference
Report Tabs – Summary, ICC Contrcts, IDB Board Contracts, IPH/IHE/IMC Contracts, Debt Service Contracts, Contracts, Aged by Expiration Date and Delinquents.
TIF report available in Excel with above specified populated fields.
While the above minimum requirements will get taxpayers by, given an estimated $120M in annual estimated incentives, a more robust measurement solution is need to inform taxpayers. A County administered web based application is needed for consolidated tax incentive management for multiple abating boards that would facilitate PILOT sizing, PILOT contracts, MWBE compliance tracking and etc.