It feels as if it were just yesterday that we were counting down the seconds for the ball to drop on New Years Eve and here we are already a few days into March. Things are moving rather quickly at the Citrus County Property Appraiser's office and outside as well. Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow, so we know that springtime is right around the corner. 

Just like that we have made it through our statutory March 1st deadline for exemption and classification application submissions. Don’t worry if you missed the March 1st deadline for filing your homestead exemption or any additional exemptions!  Please just stop by our Inverness or Crystal River office and file an application as soon as possible. I am very happy to announce that we will be happy to take a late-file application for you without any penalties.

Some of you may be asking yourself, “What has the Citrus County Property Appraiser’s office been doing these last couple of months”? Trust me, I know you ask yourself that all of the time.  Well let me tell you.  We have been extremely busy!!

This time last year I wrote an article about not wanting to be the type of government that hides or keeps things from the public. We want to be 100% transparent to those that we serve. I truly believe that we have kept that promise to you and really made great strides with our community outreach and community service.

I want to make sure that all of our Citrus County residents and property owners, residential and business alike, know who we are, what we do, and how we can assist them. Since the beginning of the year, I have presented to multiple organizations doing just that.  Let me tell you about a few of those presentations. 

Habitat for Humanity has a great new homeowner class and we have been provided an amazing opportunity to teach them what they need to do as far as applying for their homestead exemption, explaining why our field staff would visit their home, and we review the different mailings they will receive from us.

The Female Veterans Network of Citrus County and Citrus County Veterans Coalition invited us to speak to their groups at their respective monthly meetings about the different disabled veteran exemptions. We were also invited to speak at the 2024 Spring BOCC Citizens Academy Constitutional Day as well as with the Downtown Inverness Rotary Club monthly meeting.

In addition to speaking about what our office does I am oftentimes asked to speak about leadership, which is something that I'm very passionate about. Our office was excited to host the Tyler Technologies Florida User Group Conference this year at the Plantation on Crystal River. At this conference I was able to speak to multiple property appraiser offices from around the state about leadership and personal growth.

Similar to the Tyler conference presentation, the YMCA Youth Leadership Citrus and Citrus County Chamber of Commerce Leadership Citrus Directors invited me to speak about leadership and personal growth to them as well. What is great about those programs is that they are completely different age groups; high school juniors and seniors as well as grown adults with full time jobs in our community. Both programs were looking for the same inspiration on leadership, how to serve our community, and how they can better their personal growth.

One of our organizational goals recently has been to hold informational training opportunities for the public. I’m proud to say that we have done just that. We have hosted three classes to date for our citizens as well as a realtor training session just last month. In addition to those training opportunities, the Citrus County Building Alliance reached out to our office and asked if we could host a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping training session for their membership. Of course, we said YES! We look forward to hosting more training sessions for our property owners, realtors, business owners, or members of any group in Citrus County. 

Moving on from presentations, we are actively working with property owners that have homes on our beautiful coastline.  In 2023, the Florida Legislators enacted a property tax abatement refund statute for those that were unfortunately affected by catastrophic events such as natural disasters similar to those that Citrus County had at the end of 2023. We have been able to do field inspections on affected properties and are currently processing all applications that were submitted by the residents who endured tornado or hurricane damage from those storms.   We know that we can help them.

Finishing off our first two months of the year, our staff has generously donated their own funds towards the Friends of Crystal Memorial Gardens Cemetery and Joshua's House for Golden Retriever Rescue & Sanctuary. We attended multiple Habitat for Humanity home dedications and wall blessings, helped pack food for Lecanto Primary School students with Citrus County Blessings, and read to students at Pleasant Grove Elementary School with the Citrus County Education Foundation Celebrity Readers program.

Even though it's only been two months into the 2024 year we have been very fortunate to be able to do so much for our amazing community. The best part is, it doesn’t stop here. Throughout the remainder of the year, we have many more things we will accomplish, citizens that we will serve, and can’t wait to tell all the readers about them this time next year.

Until then, we look forward to providing Citrus County residents and property owners with continued information in the coming months.  Our Customer Service Department is always available to answer questions in both offices. Please call (352) 341-6600 or visit our website at www.citruspa.org.