by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Jim Overton is as pleased as he can be to discover that reality has matched expectations for his new job.
“This is a great job,” said Overton, Duval County’s new property appraiser. “And it’s an intellectually stimulating job. This is interesting work, trying to determine with math and with art what a property is worth.
“Ernie [Mastroianni] told me this was a wonderful job. He said he hoped I enjoyed it as much as he did.”
Overton defeated William King on May 13 to take over the job Mastroianni had held for 15 years.
After 10 years of representing District 14 on City Council, term limits blocked Overton from running again. But, he said, he was ready to take on a new challenge.
“It wasn’t a significant loss for me to leave the Council; I was ready to leave anyway,” he said. “There were plenty of things to do. There always are, not the least of which is sort of debating the issues of the day for the city.
“But there’s a limit to your freshness in a job like that.”
Overton is still undecided if term limits are good for everyone. If they’re kept, he recommended they be adjusted.
“I think it’s a pretty good idea that you occasionally have some turnover in elected offices, particularly in City Council, the lower levels of government,” he said. “I’m not sure the U.S. Senate is that key. Even there, I think a dozen or so years is probably enough, and I think probably the same thing for the House.
“I also think eight years is probably a little too short. Most term limits, if you’re going to have them, they ought to be 12 years.”
The benefits of term limits, Overton pointed out, have come with a price — that of turning too many legislative bodies into battlegrounds.
“Leadership struggles become very pronounced because everybody knows you’re leaving on a certain date,” he said. “So, if you’re going to be president of Council or president of the Senate or speaker of the House, you’d better get ready.
“Part of what you see in the Florida Legislature right now comes from that, the fractiousness you see in the Legislature. It’s not just Democrats versus Republicans. It’s Republicans versus Republicans.”
Overton has been gratified to find so many capable people at all levels of the property appraiser’s office and hasn’t seen the need to make significant changes.
“This is a great bunch of people,” he said. “I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the staff, quality of the management.”
He does intend to add perhaps as many as 18 people to the staff of 100 because, “We’re not fulfilling some of our mandates, like inspecting every property every third year. We’ve tried to put more people in the street in the residential areas, but we are understaffed.”
The only major challenge Overton has his eye on at the moment is the report being compiled now by the Council auditor’s office, “and we’ll have to respond to that.”
The department recently came through the appraisal “protest period” and allowed the Value Adjustment Board to use the offices so the public could file appeals.
“As a result,” Overton said, “there was a significant increase in the number of VAB petitions that were filed this year. It was a lot easier this year for the public to file petitions.
“We survey everybody who comes through the door, and the commentaries we got back were very good, very positive feedback from the public about friendliness and the efficiency of the staff. I think things are looking up.”
The department has been approved for a new software system to replace the 10-year-old flat-file system that has become “increasingly inadequate for our purposes. There’s no way you can look in there and relate (the information) to something else. I can’t look up every house that’s got a red roof, for example. I have to look up every house.”
The property appraiser’s office on Oct. 1 will turn on its new online map, produced through a new Esri GIS database.
“That makes it easier for us to appraise property,” Overton said. “But it also makes it better for everybody in the City who uses our database. And almost everybody uses our database.”
Overton listed several accomplishments by the Council during his tenure: the renaissance of the Riverside Historic District, downtown revitalization, construction of the Adam’s Mark Hotel, purchase of the St. James Building, the Jacksonville Jaguars’ lease.
He only has a few regrets.
“The major thing the Council didn’t get done is we should have rewritten the zoning law,” he said. “It’s been a project that’s plagued the Planning Department and City Council for years.”
And there’s all the business that’s turned away because Jacksonville doesn’t have an adequate convention center, he said:
“We have a 78,000 square-foot facility [the Osborn Center] down there that is sized for a town about the size of — not to cast aspersions — Winter Haven. It’s used primarily as a large community meeting facility and, occasionally, for smaller shows. It’s just not big enough for Jacksonville.
“We have more meeting space in the Adam’s Mark than in the convention center itself. We lose a tremendous amount of convention business in this town. It would drive the Landing, which would help us with the entertainment district.”