Will Edmiston have a fifth term?
Bossier Parish Assessor Bobby Edmiston is running for a fifth term as assessor of one of the state’s fastest growing parishes; not surprisingly, he has an opponent. Campaign signs are popping up for north Bossier City resident and real estate agent Pasty Maggio.
Unfortunately, Maggio hasn’t been available to visit about her candidacy or any plans for improving or changing the assessor’s office – a most curious circumstance for a serious candidate.
But this isn’t Edmiston’s first contested race; in fact, the 2015 election will count as his fourth. Edmiston was first elected in 1998. Out of the 11,208 votes cast, Edmiston took 45.11 percent; contenders Fred Alford and Henry Burns received 28.5 percent and 26.39 percent of the vote respectively. In the 2003 race, and of the 21,706 votes cast, Edmiston garnered 76.15 percent of the votes, while contender Tommy Keith received 23.85 percent of those ballots. Unopposed in 2007, Edmiston again had opposition in 2011; of the 19,965 votes cast, Edmiston (73.16 percent) bested contender Ryal Siem (26.84 percent).
In the absence of Edmiston’s current contender’s plans – I had a visit with Edmiston. Edmiston said over the years he’s been approached to pursue other public offices, “… but I don’t have any desire to do that. I have the desire to be the assessor. I’m not going to say that after I retire, I may not look at one of those. But I want to be the assessor. I think I’ve done an excellent job.”
And he mentioned a few achievements over the last decade and a half. “Probably my greatest achievement since we’ve been here is we brought the technology up to today’s technology. We’ve got PCs on everybody’s desk – dual monitors on everybody’s desk. We’ve got a stateof-the-art [geographic information system] mapping system. And that interacts with the public. Everything that we have now is digitized so you don’t have to go out there and look in a book to find [what you’re looking for]. You can go and find plat maps and ownership records and all that straight on the computer. And that saves a lot of time, a lot of effort.”
Edmiston said subscribers to his website and the Bossier Clerk of Court’s website – title professionals, landmen, oil and gas workers – can skip a trip to the Bossier Parish Courthouse and instead find everything they’re looking for on the websites. “They can pretty much do anything they can do standing in this office from the website,” he said.
Edmiston said while his office created the GIS, it’s a system that’s used by virtually all public agencies in the parish including the police jury, sheriff, school board, City of Bossier and the parish’s public safety agencies – all for a wide variety of different purposes.
“The GIS – once you build a GIS – it is not a static deal. It’s always ongoing because there’s a 40-acre tract of property out there that all of the sudden it’s platted into 40 lots of a subdivision. You’ve got to draw those 40 lots, you’ve got to put in the road, you’ve got to put in the addresses. As they’re selling, the names are changing – as homes are being built, you get upgraded aerial photographs. Now you see the homes – so it’s always and ongoing process,” he said.
“Probably one of the best things I did, because Bossier Parish is unusual to a lot of parishes – the parish seat is not in the biggest city in Bossier Parish. We’re 12 miles from the biggest city. So we have a sub-office in [Bossier] city hall that people can go to. They can sign up for their homestead exemption, they can research properties if they want to, they can do anything there that they can do here. It saves them a drive,” he said.
“We also have a kiosk that’s inside the sheriff’s substation on Arthur Ray Teague. It’s just a computer stand alone, but people that don’t have computers or don’t subscribe to our deal and want to look at other properties – they can drop in there, get on the computer and they can look, again, at anything we’ve got from that location.”
He invited Bossier Parish residents to go to the assessor’s website (bossierparishassessor.org) to learn how property value is assessed, state laws that govern assessments and how to contact his office with questions or concerns.
Edmiston also said he runs his office “as much like a business as I can.” His staff is about 20 employees; it was 30 or more when he took office in 1999. “We’ve moved forward,” he said. “We’re going to continue to move forward.”
Marty Carlson, a freelance writer, has been covering local news for the past 17 years. She can be reached via email at martycarlson1218@ gmail.com.
