Corey Gillenwater - Labor to Data Pipeline and Mobile Technology

The Quiet Revolution in Chatham County

There's something happening in Savannah that deserves our attention, not because it's flashy or revolutionary, but precisely because it isn't. Corey Gillenwater has spent two years as interim chief appraiser in Chatham County, Georgia, building what many of us chase but few achieve: an assessment office where people actually want to work.

The numbers tell part of the story. Chatham County manages 125,000 real estate parcels in what many call "boomtown" Savannah, a jurisdiction experiencing explosive growth with half the population being newcomers. But the real story isn't in the statistics. It's in how they've turned one of our profession's most thankless tasks into something approaching meaningful work.

The Feedback Equation

"Organizations are very good at saying when things go wrong," Gillenwater notes, with the kind of understatement that comes from experience. We've all been there, the emergency meetings, the post-mortems, the very public discussions of what went wrong. But Gillenwater has flipped the script in Chatham County.

Private criticism, public praise. It sounds simple, but the execution requires discipline most offices lack. When someone makes a mistake, they get a one-on-one conversation in a setting where "they can be vulnerable." When someone succeeds? That gets broadcast to the entire office.

This isn't feel-good management theory. It's practical psychology applied to government work. In a profession where taxpayers only call to complain and politicians only notice when values spike, internal recognition becomes the primary currency of motivation.

Labor to Data: The Eternal Pipeline

Gillenwater brings an IT background to the chief appraiser role, a combination that's becoming less unusual but remains far from common. His perspective cuts through much of our industry's technological hand-wringing: "A lot of technology is starting to take over things... but you can't buy experience."

This frames our central challenge perfectly. We're not trying to replace appraisers with algorithms. We're trying to augment human judgment with computational power. The distinction matters, especially when recruiting becomes a crisis and institutional knowledge walks out the door with every retirement.

Consider their approach to mobile technology. During COVID, Chatham County learned the hard way that "just going mobile doesn't solve the problem." They started with Microsoft Surface tablets running remote desktop software, a solution that technically worked but practically failed. Dead zones killed connections. Tiny interfaces frustrated field staff. The technology existed, but it wasn't designed for the actual work.

The lesson? Technology adoption isn't about having the latest tools. It's about understanding exactly how your people work and finding tools that enhance rather than complicate their jobs. As Gillenwater puts it: "Know exactly what the labor expectations are of your staff that go out into the field."

The CAMA Conversion Paradox

There's an old joke in our profession about getting two CAMA conversions before retirement. Gillenwater's experience suggests we might want to revise that to one. His critical insight: "The biggest challenge is really how are you going to get your data out of the CAMA system that you have."

Chatham County discovered their legacy system stored parcel IDs in one table with joins that only the original architects understood. County DBAs couldn't crack it. The conversion team was stumped. They only solved it by tracking down the original developers, now specializing in exactly this kind of data extraction.

The takeaway for all of us: demand exit strategies from your vendors. Not because you plan to leave, but because someone 20 years from now will need to. It's professional courtesy to your successors.

The Knowledge Transfer Crisis

We're losing institutional knowledge faster than we can document it. Gillenwater's approach combines formal and informal strategies. They hire clerical staff as their farm team, exposing them to taxpayer questions from day one. The county pays for continuing education. Internal promotion is the norm, not the exception.

But the real innovation is cultural. Pre-COVID, Chatham County had organic teamwork, people finishing early would ask colleagues what they could help with. The pandemic destroyed that, creating "isolationist pockets" where people stopped helping each other. Rebuilding that collaborative culture has been Gillenwater's primary focus.

"Everybody here benefited at some point from several people taking time out of their productivity to make sure you could do your job," he reminds staff. It's not just about training new hires. It's about maintaining the social infrastructure that makes knowledge transfer possible.

The Customer Service Paradox

Here's our fundamental challenge: taxpayers only call when they're angry, but good governance requires patient explanation. Chatham County gets "most of the calls in the county... because we actually answer the phone."

That's both a blessing and a curse. They field questions about tax bills (not their department), homestead exemptions (partially their department), and property values (definitely their department). The temptation is to transfer quickly. The professional response is to listen first.

Gillenwater sees AI chatbots as a partial solution, not to replace human interaction but to handle routine queries so staff can focus on complex problems. But he's realistic about the timeline: "Generationally, for that to be very effective, you're going to have to have people that aren't so dependent on hearing somebody else's voice."

The Trust Equation

Perhaps the most persistent gap between public perception and our reality concerns how values are determined. Citizens see their tax bills rise and assume we're arbitrary or punitive. They don't understand market areas, or why their neighbor's sale affects their assessment, or why we can't simply freeze values because they haven't "put a new nail in the house in 30 years."

Gillenwater's response is radical transparency plus radical empathy. Explain the market approach. Show the data. But first, acknowledge their frustration. In a political environment where property taxes are increasingly contentious, this kind of public engagement isn't optional, it's survival.

Key Takeaways

For Leadership: Culture precedes technology. Before investing in new systems, invest in the human infrastructure that makes those systems useful.

For Technology Adoption: Understand your actual workflows before selecting solutions. The best technology amplifies human capability rather than replacing it.

For Knowledge Management: Internal promotion and continuous education aren't expenses, they're insurance against institutional amnesia.

For Public Trust: Transparency isn't just posting data online. It's actively engaging taxpayers where they are, in language they understand.

For the Profession: We're not in the property business or the technology business. We're in the public trust business. Everything else, the data, the systems, the assessments, serves that ultimate purpose.

Chatham County's approach won't work everywhere. But their fundamental insight, that sustainable assessment operations require social architecture as robust as our technical systems, deserves consideration in every jurisdiction. In an era of technological disruption and political pressure, Gillenwater has built something increasingly rare: an office that works.