County Innovations and Solutions - Nov. 2, 2015

Map tool introduces public to assessor’s wealth of county data

King County, Wash. has a diverse real estate market and a lot of people interested in data. Interest in both was evident when the assessor’s office got an increasing number of calls from residents and businesses looking for information on any number of topics.

“We had a growing demand, es­pecially when the economy turned, folks would come to our office and say they wanted information about how their neighborhood was chang­ing,” said Assessor Lloyd Hara.

And serving them wasn’t as easy as just pulling up the data they wanted.

“They’d have to call us to get a complete report, and that would take about two hours to a week, depending on the complexity of the issue,” said his community outreach manager, Phillip Sit.

A seven-month development effort compiled assessment infor­mation, along with Census data, and synthesized that data into a comprehensive mapping tool, which can be used to extract data based on user-drawn boundaries.

“You can draw the shape and it pulls the data from a multitude of census tracts and does it in real time,” Sit said.

The information is useful for resi­dents, the private sector, nonprofits and even the county government. Loaded onto tablet computer, Lo­calScape can go into the field with the assessor’s office staff.

“That’s been a real advantage for our appraisers because we’re under tight budget constraints and adding another full-time employee to do data retrieval wouldn’t be possible,” Hara said.

But it isn’t just a tool for profes­sionals.

“That’s the cool thing,” Hara said about homeowners. “They can do it themselves. They can ask, ‘how is my neighborhood chang­ing,’ and define their neighborhood and find out. They can see property values change over time and have easy access to numbers they would have had to dig for hours to find.”

And that kind of community engagement is another of the ben­efits LocalScape brings to the table.

Both Hara and Sit, while speak­ing at NACo’s Large Urban County Caucus Leadership Symposium in King County, said the data was going generally underused when it was hard or time-consuming to access, and its presentation was a chance to prove the county was as capable of visualizing data that it gathered as real estate site Zillow, which was started in King County.

Over three years, the program will cost $230,000 for both the development and operating budget.

Since its release in April 2015, LocalScape has found audiences beyond the private citizens, real estate industry and appraisers that it envisioned. Other King County departments, including public health, and the equality and social justice program, have contacted the assessor’s office to integrate their data into LocalScape’s library.

It has also given the general public a better understanding of what the assessor’s office does.

Ultimately, Hara hopes to be able to move property tax payments to LocalScape, eliminating the need for postage and printing of paper tax bills.

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