In November, Harris County voters elected Annette Ramirez as the tax assessor-collector. Since taking office in January, Ramirez said she made a point of not only meeting with every employee in the downtown Houston office, but also visited all 16 branches where residents interact with her office.
Understanding what the needs are throughout the county allows Ramirez to tackle the different challenges her office faces, including what she said was a lack of investment and a reliance on temporary staff, as well as process inefficiencies, which in the end, she said impacts the quality of services her department gives to taxpayers.
"I think during [COVID-19], we had to change so many processes to account for that, and we need to go back and reevaluate and see what what needs to be tweaked so that we can do it better. So that's so that's what we've been doing ... It's already the end of four months. It's gone really quickly," Ramirez said.
By the numbers
The Harris County Tax Office has 16 locations which provide direct services to more residents than any other county department, according to county documents, including:
- Property taxes: more than 1.7 million property tax accounts
- Motor vehicle: more than 3.4 million vehicle registration transactions annually including titles and other auto services
- Voter registration: at least 2.6 million registered voter accounts
As far as annual revenue, Ramirez said her office collects and disburses over $10.5 billion in annual revenue that local governments use to deliver services to residents including:
- Health care
- Infrastructure
- Public health
- Community safety
Ramirez said her office is working on implementing several new initiatives towards the next fiscal year, aimed at providing more flexible payment options and increase awareness of tax-saving opportunities for Harris County residents.
- Advanced payment plans: Property owners would be able make equal monthly payments in advance (six-10 months) to spread out their tax burden, helping them avoid January lump-sum payments and potential delinquency.
- Multilingual outreach: To ensure all property owners understand their options, the office is expanding translation services beyond Spanish to provide information in multiple languages.
- Proactive communication: Educating property owners about different exemption opportunities, payment strategies and ways to protect their property investments before they face financial difficulties.
What is something we might not know about the county's tax office?
We collect and assess the property taxes, not just for Harris County, but for about 80 other taxing entities in Harris County. So that would be the city of Houston, all of your [emergency services districts], your small little taxing entities [and] a handful of school districts. So we, we collect all of those.
Where have you seen the lack of investment over the years?
There's a heavy reliance on temporary staff here, and so ... one of my requests to [Harris County] commissioners board is to start moving away from temporary staff and slowly convert those temporary staff to permanent staff that have a better wage, benefits, a pension [and] health care. Those things are important to me, and also we just were losing a lot of staff because they don't see a career path for themselves, if they're temporary.
[We're] hoping that they now see that we're investing in them and that they are willing to stay. We train them, and eventually that will create efficiencies in customer service. The longer our staff stays here, the better service we provide. They get better at their job, and they become more efficient, and then that translates to our customers having shorter wait times in our lobbies because they are just excessive right now.
Right now we have really long hold times on the phone, and we have a high percentage of calls that are dropped, so hopefully transitioning right from temporary to permanent over time. Also, we're understaffed in some areas. We asked support for some additional management staff for succession planning and filling some of those gaps.
You made a presentation to Commissioners Court on March 27 asking for supplemental funding for your department. Could you explain where the need came from?
What we found was our customers were waiting over two hours at some of our branches, sometimes longer than that. We probably touch more residents and taxpayers or property owners in this office than any other office in the county, and so likely, if one of our residents is going to interact with government only one time a year, it's going to be in this office, and it might be the only interaction they have with government in any expenditure period.
I want to make sure that the one interaction they have, or the limited interaction they have is a good experience, and that they get the information they need, and they feel leaving like they understand everything, and they got all the answers to the questions they needed, and they're confident that we're doing a good job. And so we need this investment in this office in order to do those things.
While the motion was approved, how has the funding impacted services your office offers to residents?
We asked for 29 new positions and 12 of them were mid-level positions for succession planning and middle management, and then some compliance and auditing positions, and 17 of them were frontline staff. There was an additional 20 that were temporary workers that we asked to be converted to permanent, where we have our highest turnover. So a total of 29 new positions, but 20 of those would have been folks that were temporary in our office that we're transitioning to permanent.
What is your goal?
I just have a goal of making sure that our customers have the best experience, and in order to do that, we need to create some efficiencies in our office. And I think it's incumbent upon me as a public servant to make sure that we deliver efficient services, and that that will make me feel like we're using their resources wisely, and that we're serving the public best we can. That's number one.
