Efficiency

Sometimes, small changes pay big dividends. Case in point: property valuation notices.

The King County Assessor is required to mail property valuation notices to every property owner in King County annually, a total of nearly 740,000 notices. Obviously, this requires a significant investment in postage, printing and staffing costs.

We reengineered our entire notification program to increase efficiency, improve customer service, and save money.

• We redesigned the valuation notice to postcard size, cutting paper costs by 50 percent and saving King County taxpayers more than $110,000 annually on postage.
• For property owners with multiple parcels, we printed and mailed full-sheet notices, simplifying paperwork for our customers and reducing postage costs.
• We streamlined the production and mailing process.
• We introduced an electronic property valuation notice that will significantly reduce printing and postage costs over time. Electronic property valuation notices are posted to a website and the property owner is notified by email when the evaluations are posted.

We also rethought how we use office space, consolidating from two floors to one floor to save the County $200,000 a year in space costs.

And to help us and our city partners, we developed an e-Permitting partnership with cities to transmit building permit data electronically, saving money and bringing new construction to the tax roll more quickly.