Maya Rodriguez / Eyewitness News
Email: mrodriguez@wwltv.com | Twitter: @mrodriguezwwl
CITY HALL-- From the the first floor to the fourth floor, New Orleans property owners waited their turn at City Hall to speak to an appraiser.
"We came down here because there seemed to be some confusion in our bill," said Cindy Bush, an Uptown homeowner who came to the office with her husband, Ed.
Harry Christophe of New Orleans East spent more than three hours at City Hall on Wednesday morning.
"I waited in the first line downstairs for about an hour and a half," he said. "Then, I had to come up to line number two up here for another hour."
The Assessor's Office sent out 63,000 notices; about 41,000 of them let property owners know their assessment went up.
"When you send out thousands of notices, you expect a lot of people to come in," said New Orleans Assessor Erroll Williams.
Williams said all of it is part of bringing "uniformity" to the assessments - an ongoing process since early 2011, when he became the first citywide, single-assessor.
"I have to take strategically take what resources I have and systematically go through neighborhoods and try to make the changes, until I get 100 percent," Williams said. "I'm close, but I'm not close enough because there are some neighborhoods that still require more work."
That includes places like the French Quarter, where some property owners saw their assessments doubled. Other homeowners said, they just want to pay what is fair.
"We really need to get our tax base in order so that we can pay the bills and do what we need to do to bring the city forward," Cindy Bush said.
An earlier glitch led to some homestead exemptions getting removed, but Williams said those have since been reinstated.
"I'd like to say we are on cruise control, but we're not there," Williams said. "We have a lot of changes, a lot of challenges we're still trying to overcome."
Property owners looking to appeal their assessment will be able to do beginning August 16 through August 20.
