The Maricopa County Assessor’s Office has replaced decades-old technology used to value land.
The new cloud-based system took about a decade to develop and cost around $20 million.
The Assessor’s Office employs hundreds of people to value 1.8 million properties throughout Maricopa County every year.
Until recently, they relied on a system from 1992, which was last updated before the first iPhone came out.
Assessor Eddie Cook says the new platform can do what used to take multiple applications.
“The property owner will now be rest assured that the accuracy of our data is even better and higher quality,” said Cook, who has been Maricopa County assessor since early 2020.
He replaced Paul Petersen, who was implicated in an international adoption scam, and had allowed the technology replacement project to fall behind.
Officials worried the old system could be hacked. But the new system runs through a secure Cloud.
“So that already protects the customer data from any of their private information being accessible to anybody but themselves,” said Cook.
The old system gave Cook sleepless nights worrying about a crash or hiccup that could have shut down the Assessor’s Office.
