Avoyelles Assessor’s Office to hold website workshop May 10

New online site to be available in early May

A wealth of information concerning properties in Avoyelles Parish is literally at your fingertips -- your computer keyboard. However, it remains unavailable unless you know how to access it.

Since Avoyelles Assessor Heath Pastor has established the website to make that information available to the public, he is sponsoring a two-hour workshop May 10 to teach people how to use the website. The workshop will be held from 9-11 a.m. at the LSU AgCenter on La. Hwy 1 in Mansura.

The new Avoyelles Assessor’s Mapping website will be released to the public at the beginning of May. Once that site rolls out, the current website will no longer work.

“The updated site can be viewed by the public at avoyellesassessor.org under the map tab,” he said.

Pastor said the workshop will include demonstrations on how to use the office’s website to gather needed information, such as determining property ownership, calculating approximate acreage, locating physical addresses and viewing visual layers such as city limit and ward lines.

“Although I urge anyone that utilizes land records on a daily basis -- such as abstractors, appraisers, surveyors, and public agency employees to attend -- this workshop is open to the general public as well,” Pastor said.

Pastor said one of the main duties of the Assessor’s Office is to accurately list all property on the tax rolls.

With more than 35,000 parcels of land in the parish, the Assessor’s Office relies heavily on a Geographic Information System (GIS) to map the parish.

“Legal descriptions, values and ownership must be maintained on each of these parcels,” Pastor said. “ To accomplish this task, we are very excited with the upcoming release of a new mapping website hosted by Edge Mapping.

“The utilization of this GIS system within our office has tremendously increased the accuracy and detail of our records,” he continued. “Land that has conflict or title problems are often times discovered through the tools that GIS has to offer.”

Pastor said the computer tools help to inform the public of discrepancies that might otherwise go unnoticed.

“Another substantial benefit of this mapping system allows us to utilize soil overlays to determine land use classifications,” he added.

Pastor said the upgrade allows the public to immediately view changes the Assessor’s Office makes through the website, which includes using a Smartphone.

“Behind the scenes, this updated mapping system financially benefited a large percentage of our landowners recently as oil leasing agents were quickly able to access the information needed to lease mineral rights,” Pastor noted. “Researching ownership via this updated GIS system has been invaluable to these companies as our records allowed large blocks of land to be leased quickly by shortening the title research process.”

Even though the maps on the website “are not survey quality property lines,” the information is a “tremendous aid in linking the tax rolls to the real life scenarios on the ground. “

Pastor said property is often transferred from generation to generation without surveys.

“In such cases, the parcel lines are drawn as a rough estimate,” he said. “Please contact our office if any ownership record needs to be updated on the map as property that has not had an ownership change in several years may need to be relabeled on the map.”

Those planning to attend the workshop should RSVP by telephone at 253-4507 or email triche@apassessor.org.

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