Norwich — At least one member of the Selectboard is proposing that the town abolish its listers in favor of an assessor-only model that he says could improve valuations and minimize conflict between professional contractors and citizen officials.

Selectman Steve Flanders is proposing a vote at Town Meeting to replace the three elected listers, often unskilled residents who volunteer for a small stipend, with trained assessors who he says could produce higher-quality work without the friction that sometimes can arise between contractors and citizen boards.

Listers produce and update the town’s grand list, which helps the Selectboard set a tax rate that raises money for town services and schools. Depending on a community’s work arrangement, listers may visit houses for appraisals, hear grievances and represent the town in appeals.

Although a contracted professional assessor has been assisting the citizen board for the past few years, visiting homes and coming up with an assessed value, recent tension in that relationship and a dearth of candidates in lister elections spurred Flanders, a former Selectboard chairman, to make his proposal in a memo for tonight’s Selectboard meeting.

“With only one candidate, there is no ability for the voters to choose who is most qualified or to opt out of choosing an under-qualified or poorly performing lister,” Flanders said in an email on Tuesday. “The only way to dislodge an incumbent under-performing public official is for another candidate to run for the same office.”

Flanders’ memo to the board was co-signed by Selectman John Langhus, who backed away from the proposal slightly on Tuesday, saying he had only “signed on to the idea of having this discussion.”

“There are very strong arguments on both sides of this,” Langhus said by phone on Tuesday.

Speaking on behalf of the Board of Listers on Tuesday, Chairwoman Cheryl Lindberg recommended that the town not adopt Flanders’ idea.

“This action will abolish the town’s long-held tradition of a local assessment process,” she said. “Elected officials are answerable to the people of the town. Rather than establish a new bureaucracy of consultants and/or new employees answerable only to the town manager, this model of listers/assessor provides the town with a system of checks and balances, complimented by the skills of an assessor. We ask that the Selectboard remain steadfast in its respect for Vermont town government and services that are ‘of, for, and by the people.’ ”

Lister Dennis Kaufman said tension had developed in the lister-assessor relationship over how much the elected officials should involve themselves in the contractor’s day-to-day work.

“The listers want to be involved, and he’s preferred not to let us in on his secrets,” Kaufman said of the assessor, Bill Krajeski of New England Municipal Consultants. “Any time I’ve asked him to let me in on how he comes to a particular value, he has chosen not to tell me.”

Krajeski declined to comment, saying in an email that doing so would be “inappropriate for me as a contractor for the town.”

Town records show that Krajeski approached the Selectboard and the listers several times over the course of 2017, eventually asking to be let out of his three-year contract, which ends on June 30, 2019.

“Bill Krajeski stated that he believes that there is a breach of contract on the part of the town, and that he wants to be let out of the rest of the contract,” minutes for the Nov. 20 listers meeting said. “He does not want to continue in the role of Norwich’s Contract Assessor, and does not believe that (New England Municipal Consultants) and the current Board of Listers can work together productively.”

The Selectboard declined to let him out of the contract early, but according to the terms of his agreement, Krajeski can leave as soon as July if he provides sufficient notice to the town.

Kaufman served as a lister for about a decade until losing a contested election in 2011.

During that period, the listers collected hourly wages and participated directly in home assessments. Kaufman gained a reputation as an enterprising lister who scanned home ads for property improvements that weren’t brought to the town’s attention.

Norwich also fielded questions from state officials over its assessment tactics, as well as a few costly lawsuits over contested valuations, including a case brought by eight homeowners along Bragg Hill Road that the town resolved with nearly $140,000 in property tax credits.

Although Norwich previously had an assessor, in 2013, the town began to delegate responsibilities to contracted assessors, retaining the listers to certify the grand list and otherwise supervise the professionals’ work.

The change also meant the elimination of the listers’ hourly pay — which reached as high as $18.62 — in favor of a $1,500 annual stipend.

“This resulted in lower costs and better performance statistics, but has caused confusion about roles and responsibilities,” Langhus and Flanders said in an August memo to the Selectboard.

Liz Blum, a former selectwoman who unseated Kaufman in 2011 to join the Board of Listers, said she had pursued the office to help push those changes through.

“The reason I ran in the first place was to change the system to get a professional assessor because the town had too much litigation that cost the town hundreds of thousands of dollars under the old system,” she said on Tuesday. “We were always in conflict with the state, too.”

Now, Blum said, she is in favor of eliminating the office of the listers, who she said “aren’t really trained technically,” other than through experience and occasional seminars offered by the state.

In a twist of fate, Blum decided to retire as a lister before last year’s Town Meeting. No one ran for her seat, clearing the way for Kaufman to take the position back by write-in.

The lack of interest in lister positions is one reason why some nearby towns are moving away from the arrangement as well.

Hartford Town Manager Leo Pullar said his town voted last year to move away from listers in favor of a professional assessor. The main problem, he said, was that it was too hard to fill the spots — so hard, in fact, that some positions have been empty for years.

“That was the biggest challenge,” he said on Tuesday.

As for how quality of service and cost may have changed, “it’s too soon to speak,” he said. “We anticipate less appeals, and when we do have an appeal, we expect to have a better understanding of why a property was assessed a certain way.”

Farther down the Connecticut River, Hartland also is moving away from the lister model, according to Town Manager Dave Ormiston.

“We’re sort of morphing toward the assessor way of doing things,” he said, mostly because of the difficulty in finding listers with the time and dedication to do the work.

Ormiston, a former interim town manager in Norwich, said Hartland still had listers who contributed to the valuation process. Hartland has a staff assessor whose responsibilities Ormiston expected to grow, at some point necessitating a conversation about “what to do about the listers,” he said.

More towns statewide are beginning to move away from a listers-only model, with some dropping the elected officials altogether, according to Jill Remick, acting director of the Vermont Department of Taxes’ property valuation and review division.

“It’s really hard to get folks to run for or be appointed to these elected positions,” she said on Tuesday. “They’re asked to do this really complex, onerous work for not a lot of compensation.”

Remick noted, however, that many towns have chosen to adopt a strategy somewhat like Norwich’s current arrangement: retaining listers as elected supervisors for the professional assessor.

Communities that have moved away from listers entirely tend to include larger cities such as Rutland and Burlington, along with some of the state’s wealthier towns, she said.

“You still want to have elected officials at the town level who can participate,” she said.

Kaufman echoed that sentiment.

“Having local people represent the interests of the citizens — and that means a fair and equal grand list, where the assessments are properly calculated — is important to everybody in the town,” he said.

Kaufman said he wasn’t advocating for a return to a lister-only model; rather, he said, he would prefer that authority over the assessor’s contract be vested in the listers, rather than in the town manager, as the current agreement provides.

“It’s written that I control the contract and that’s not how it should be,” Town Manager Herb Durfee said on Tuesday. “(The control) should reside with the listers.”

The Norwich Selectboard is scheduled to discuss the lister proposal, along with the proposed budget, revisions to the Town Plan and proposed items for the Town Meeting warning, at 6:30 tonight at Tracy Hall.

Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.

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