It’s possible that you, or someone you work with, recently got included on a giant email from the IDNR, asking about drainage districts.
I’m actually really shocked at how many responses I’m seeing to the effect of “we don’t have those”.
@jthompson, you showed up in the email thread with a couple of links to the USACE’s levee inventory, which was really interesting to see, but it got me thinking.
In Kendall, when people say “drainage district”, it’s kind of like saying “special service area”. It’s a matter of taxation, not necessarily hydrology.
Really Old Taxing Bodies
Similar to drainage, we’ve got school district boundaries in Kendall. The boundaries are definitely somewhere, but nobody can actually point to a document that establishes where. Same with drainage. As a taxing body, they were established by a physical document, somewhere in the County’s past. Maybe there’s some crumbling paper in the Clerk’s Office, who knows.
Here’s the thing, though: people’s tax bills are determined by whether they are in or out of these various districts. Our “layer” for these districts is really dissolving parcels by tax district attribute.
So, how do you handle cases when a district’s shape definitely exists, but you can’t actually find the records of it? Is that just the clerk’s problem? Is the burden of proof on the taxing bodies?
That’s interesting. I didn’t know Peoria County had drainage district data until I received the IDNR email. I found out the drainage district data is not in our property tax system (Devnet). I believe most counties use Devnet. I talked to the chief assessor and they never added it to Devnet because it could not calculate the assessments correctly. Once a year, the chief assessor receives a spreadsheet of parcel numbers from the drainage district attorney and then he does a $40/acre adjustment to the property assessments. The owners in that district pay taxes to that district as expected.
Once a year we also recreate all the taxing districts in the county by dissolving the parcel by tax district. Since drainage districts are in Devnet, we never got that information. Always learning new things!
Devnet over here, too. Our Clerk puts drainage into the “Special Service Areas” table, since it has a set dollar amount they need to hit, as opposed to a percent rate. We have to do a really goofy query to pull out the data, and I’m not totally confident that it’s being entered right anyway.
Maybe the assessors need to collectively petition Devnet for a new feature…
This topic definitely hits home. Especially school districts - sure we can pull district info from tax data, but have you ever tried to find a map for which individual school each address goes to? Consider yourself lucky if you can find a pdf map…that’s like finding a unicorn.
Drainage Districts are the bane of my existence. Ok - not really, but they are such a pain to deal with here. We have 35! Some have their taxes collected by the county and some collect themselves. The self collected are not always the best about matching what they collect to a parcel number so sometimes we have to research or honestly just give up the idea putting that information into our farmland assessment program for a debasement. (They are suppose to get a break on their farmland assessment because they pay drainage taxes too). I had the fortune of some surveyor made a map of all of them in the 1970s but that is my only reference and so the boundaries are kind of questionable but at least we have something in my GIS data layers. I’ve never been able to locate any legal descriptions of their boundaries. I feel like it was all handshake agreements back in the day. I did check and our Devnet has a District Type of “Drainage” as that is what our districts are all under so maybe you can just request from them that it be added as a district type.
There is a tab for Drainage/Special Districts and you can see below that in the farmland details the amount taken out due to drainage taxes being paid.