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Inquiry Essay

Decent Essays

Good afternoon Dr. Morris,

Thank you for replying to my inquiry. I believe the best place to start with this project would be to give you a bit of background information and the surrounding context from which the project originates.

The City of Southfield, Michigan is a VERY large and complex assessing jurisdiction due to the great variety of land uses within the city. We have a little bit of everything and a lot of some uses including movie theaters, arcades, hotels, and a lot of high rise multistory buildings.

The City of Southfield Assessor position has experienced instability over the past decade leading to an inconsistent property tax record.

Furthermore, Assessors in the State of Michigan are statutorily required to use the …show more content…

Lastly, I plan to also incorporate obtaining a 360° camera from Google to mount to the roof of a City of Southfield vehicle to obtain completely new street scene photos to be part of this building modeling project. I would also like to incorporate 360° helmet cameras on my appraisers when they are walking through buildings to incorporate an interior view of the buildings. (The Google photos may be a separate project phase.)

The goals of this project would include the following:

• Obtain complete and accurate building and land improvement measurements for all City of Southfield properties in a consistent manner using LiDAR technology.
• Develop the next generation of property tax record to serve as a best practice for local government and Assessors around the world. o This would mean that no longer are property attributes simply displayed on a flat 2D piece of plain white office paper. Instead a property tax record consists of a 3D building model which could incorporate for the first time ever such things as trees and bushes or other land cover. o The next generation of property tax records will also include a Google street scene and tour of the subject property.
• Any goals or missions that you or your department may want to accomplish or that develop as the project moves forward.

Ultimately, this project will be a key component to the City of Southfield becoming the first

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