SUV cameras recording properties
Brad Booth walked out of his house on West 11th Avenue and wondered what the heck was happening.
He saw several people standing around a colorful vehicle with an odd-looking contraption on top.
“I didn’t know what it was,” Booth, 62, said. “It’s got the cameras on the top.”
He lives on the Northwest Side, just south of Kinnear Avenue and west of the Olentangy River.
Booth soon learned that the Franklin County auditor is using a new way to unobtrusively photograph the
county’s 428,000 properties.
Eldridge Settles of Blacklick is one of three people hired to drive slowly through the county in the modified sport-utility vehicle for Cyclomedia Technologies.
They have driven thousands of miles in the Ford Escape equipped with five cameras and lots of computer equipment. Every 16 feet, the cameras automatically take photos that will be joined with software to create a virtual tour of Franklin County homes and businesses. Auditor Clarence Mingo, whose office paid $735,000 for the 360-degree virtual reality version of the county, will place that information on his office’s website.
“You could virtually walk the street” on the website, said Lance Gates, the auditor’s director of appraisal.
County auditors are required by law to maintain accurate information on every property. That is done, in part, because property values are used to determine how much property tax owners pay to governments. Every six years, Ohio auditors have to physically visit each property to help set its value. Franklin County’s properties are valued at a total of $102 billion, on which $2 billion is collected annually in property taxes. The street-level photos also show new construction and changes in property.
Settles and the two other drivers have to take photos of all of those properties. They’ve been at it since January and are expected to be done by the end of April. The photos, auditor spokesman Dave O’Neil said, should be on the auditor’s website by the end of May. Lasers in the vehicles measure the height, depth and width of each house and property. The old process, O’Neil said, took a year. This process takes four months.
The service is similar to what Google does with its Street View maps. But Cyclomedia offers additional features, including measuring structures to the centimeter for appraisal purposes. This also allows Mingo to fulfill his lawful responsibility to photograph each property every three years. Franklin County owns the photos.
The auditor’s website has included photos of individual houses and business for several years, but this is the first time it will have a 360-degree virtual tour capability.
“We do this to give taxpayers, residents an accurate look at their property,” O’Neil said.
“Their property will be appraised more fairly, more accurately. And it’s less intrusive. This is just a car driving down the road.”
The former system required the vehicle to stop in front of each property, resulting in residents occasionally calling to ask why the FBI was in their driveway. The Cyclomedia vehicle rarely stops, instead driving by at about 15 mph.
“We don’t get those (FBI calls) now,” O’Neil said.
Privacy concerns, such as children walking on the sidewalk and appearing in the photos, aren’t a concern. Special software used by Cyclomedia automatically blurs out faces and license plates.
The auditor’s office found that out in January, right after Christmas, after looking at the first photos returned from the program. Pictures of properties with Santa Claus figures outside them came back with the Santas’ faces blurred.
“That’s the level of sophistication this has,” O’Neil said.