Ever wanted to know how much that gaudy two-story house down the street or the corner store that’s always busy pays in property taxes?
Now you can find out because property tax data is now readily accessible to the public via Open Data BR.
When the East Baton Rouge Parish Department of Information Services launched Open Data BR last January, some of the first emails the department received were from citizens and journalists praising the service—but they asked where the property tax data was.
IS Interim Director Eric Romero says that since then, officials have worked diligently with city-parish Assessor Brian Wilson to gather the data and make it fit into the spreadsheet-type format.
On March 3, the tax roll data went live on the website.
The data has been available on the assessor’s website, but it was only searchable and is not all in one place for viewing.
“It was just a matter of us taking that data and uploading it in and making sure everything fit,” Romero says.
Wilson sends the information to the Louisiana Tax Commission every year, and now he sends a copy to Romero and his group.
On the same day the tax roll data went live, the IS department also began putting up animal control incidents on the site, says Warren Kron, city-parish Geographic Information System manager.
Property data from Central, which is something else people have been clamoring to see for a while, also is now available on the site, Kron says. Central tracks property data differently than Baton Rouge, so workers had to comb through all the data to make it is compatible with the Open Data BR format.
Now, those same workers are doing the same with property data from Zachary, Kron says. They face the same hurdle as they did in Central, but Kron says he hopes to have the information up by the end of the year.
“It’s slow, but it’s doable,” Kron says.
Other data the IS Department is compiling to put on the site are city-parish purchases under $5,000—purchases of more than $5,000 are already published—and a listing on all traffic signals in the parish, Romero and Kron say.
—Ryan Broussard
