President's Page

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Note: On Wednesday, September 25, 2024, Rob Bick was installed as NYSAA’s president for 2024-2025. Below are his thoughts on entering office.

It’s fall. That means it is football season. Football is the sport that seems to have supplanted baseball as “Americas Pastime.”

In the assessment world we are very familiar with football, as in “assessment is a political football.” I say “football”, not the typical “volleyball”, because the administrative portion of our jobs seems to bounce in varied and unpredictable ways on a yearly basis.

I have been on a lot of boards in my professional career.  (These boards include: CNY American Institute of Architects, Onondaga Yacht Club, Erie Canal Museum, Midstate Youth Hockey Assoc., Adirondack Architectural Heritage Foundation and publicly elected President of the Board of Trustees of the Northern Onondaga County Library system.)

This means that I have had to listen, to learn, argue, dictate, negotiate, collaborate, delegate, legally remove someone from a board position and the like. Rewarding and challenging, no question.

This board is different. Normally a board is guided by a particular mission statement specific to their goals and objectives. The NYSAA board has so many masters, so many issues not of our doing, so many fingers in the proverbial pie.  We are equally proactive and reactive because of all these fingers in the pie, some that honestly do not belong. All these external interjections can leave us “pie hole deep in muddy water”, but we manage to filter it and deliver a positive end result for the taxpayers.  

In essence, we only partially control our destiny. Sounds a lot like life in general, doesn’t it?

While Assessors and their staff are faced with the task of equally distributing the tax burden, that process is perpetually and increasingly undermined by new property tax exemptions, tweaks on existing exemptions, state mandated valuation requirements, liberal PILOT agreements and the like, making any type of equality in distribution merely a hypothetical concept as the assessment roll is becoming a political tool catering to special interests. Let’s be honest, we all know this. Someone has to say it.  You all have my greatest respect for toiling away and doing your best in the face of what I call these “agents of inequity.”

The bottom line here is that we have great boards. We have a top tier Executive Director, Communications Director and Treasurer. We have talented legislative liaisons to make our voices heard and our consultation valuable.  We are all dedicated and motivated to make things better for the assessment community as a whole. It is an evolution, not a revolution. It takes effort, faith in the process, luck and time to evolve. We proved this by rapidly introducing zoom classes during the pandemic to continue to offer education programming in spite of the obstacles. 

In the last few years we have also cultivated a better working relationship with our counterparts at DTF. They, like us, are tasked with creating processes that function out of legislation that at times defies logic and seems functionally counter intuitive. We truly are in this together.

There are a number of things I (we) would like to accomplish as President.  One is to recruit new blood into the profession with a dedicated program called “The Assessor Recruitment Initiative-ARI”. The second is to find a way to assist in upgrading our educational offerings. We have members now working to possibly create a community college series of coursework on assessment. That would be spectacular. I would also like to create a written path of better understanding of what we do, hopefully leading to more respect for the profession. And lastly, I think we need to have another conference back in Lake Placid. These are lofty goals, but they are shared by other board members. Evolution requires collaboration and shared responsibility to move the needle in a positive direction. 

My final thoughts are these:

Never be defined by what you could have said.

Never be defined by what you could have done.

Never be defined by what you could have been.

“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts” – Winston Churchill