Incompetence

Marty Sunshine recently asked me what obscure task could he help me with that would make my life easier. He was giddy with joy when I asked him to please find out about the property taxes. "That's all you need?" he naively asked.

Yep. That's what I needed.

You see, Jefferson County did not send me property tax notices this year. Some might think they did this because they are incompetent. They would be right.

So, early this morning Marty Sunshine went off to search for a phone number or any type of information whatsoever on Jefferson County's web site that would tell us exactly how much we owed. Three hours later, Marty was in a foul mood and no closer to finding what we had to pay.

There are no phone numbers on this site. There is no useful information on this site. In fact, the "old" way to look up properties--using the parcel ID number has been replaced by the "new" way to look up properties. The "new" way includes taking one's tax statement that was presumably mailed to them and typing in the "receipt" number one received on their tax statement.

In the event one didn't get a tax statement, Jefferson County has accounted for this: they have a message below the "tax receipt number look up" that says to contact their office if one needs a property tax notice. And then they give their physical address.

Marty Sunshine then went on to the most obvious way to look up properties: by address. Nope. This was a no-brainer to me, as the entire County has about four street names. For example, if you want to get to my home on King James Circle, one must go down King James Court, hang a left at King James Drive and proceed around the bend back to King James Court, until they reach King James Circle.

After about sixteen different searches, Marty found the place to input a parcel number--which has been how I looked up property tax information in the past. However, for whatever reason it wasn't working this morning. The noise you may have heard if you turned your head slightly in our direction was Marty Sunshine telling everyone how displeased he was that the parcel ID search wasn't working.

Eventually Marty settled for looking up each address by the name associated with the address. This is not an easy task when your last name is the same name as a county in Alabama and one's first name is probably one of the most common names on earth--as poor Marty's happens to be. Then there are a few homes titled to the LLCs also, those weren't as easy to find either, because instead of being classified as ABC Homes, LLC, they were listed in the system as (first name) LLC (last name) Homes (middle initial) A.

What we did find out through the course of this exercise is that Jefferson County has changed the parcel numbers for every single property we own. We now have the new parcel numbers so that this task will be much easier when I Marty does this again next year.

In the end, we decided that if we had just left everything alone Jefferson County probably would have sent us delinquent notices letting us know exactly how much we owed and what our parcel number happened to be. Or then again, maybe they wouldn't have noticed we hadn't paid.