County joins consortium for data systems

The Crow Wing County Board agreed to convert its in-house tax system and financial system Tuesday to the Minnesota Counties Information Systems consortium.

The system would deal with printing and generating tax statements, truth-in-taxation statements and keeps track of all the real estate property in the county.

The major effort of the conversion is to migrate the tax data from the existing database to the MCIS database, said Denny Holmen, county information systems manager.

Holmen said that once the data is transferred that no data mapping would be required for the county with the financial system because the computer cooperative would be conducting the work.

Informational Systems will support the current process for planning and zoning permits, purchase orders for receiving supplies and invoices.

Holmen said the transition process should be around two months for the tax system and the financial system would not have to be implemented until January.

"This system would be more user friendly," said Peter Herlofsky Jr., county administrator. "The taxation changes will be hard at first (learning to use it) but afterwards would be easier."

Laureen Borden, county treasurer, and Marty Schmidt, county assessor, had concerns but are now more comfortable with the plan. Schmidt said he would like to see some kind of amendment in the contract that if a county has a better way of doing things than the MCIS does then it could pursue its process.