(Mineola, NY) Assessor Harvey Levinson announced that Democratic members of the Nassau County Legislature's Rules Committee voted to approve (on March 22) a crucial $480,500 supplemental technical support contract that will enable the Department of Assessment to train in-house personnel to take control of the Integrated Assessment System used by the county's reassessment contractor and maintain the public access Website, "mynassauproperty.com."
"I am extremely grateful to Presiding Officer Judith Jacobs, Lisanne Altmann, Jeffrey Toback, Joseph Scannell, and especially David Denenberg, for their support and understanding of the necessity of this contract," stated Assessor Levinson. "This agreement will allow the computer experts that I hired to learn the daily systems maintenance routines and information transfers between the County's and Cole-Layer-Trumble Company's computer systems."
Democratic members of the Rules Committee clearly understood that a failure to authorize the modest supplemental technical support contract would have resulted in a total shutdown of information transfers between the obsolete Wang, SUN Soloris, IBM and Integrated Assessment System Computers. The ensuing systems failures and inability of the Department of Assessment to perform its statutory duties would have resulted in legal and financial ramifications against the County that would have reverberated for years and jeopardized the completion of the third phase of the court-ordered reassessment.
"While I understand and share the frustration expressed by taxpayers and legislators regarding a number of problems that I inherited as the new county assessor, I believe that we can and must work together - in a bipartisan way - to ensure that the methodologies used to set values on future rolls will improve," concluded Assessor Levinson. "The work that is done at the Department of Assessment is too important to the over 400 taxing jurisdictions that rely on the production of an accurate and up-to-date county assessment roll to ever be held hostage by politics again." |
