With Monday the last day that Fort Bend County residents can notify the county Central Appraisal District if they wish to protest their proposed property appraisals, the CAD office has been swamped.
Complicating residents’ attempts to communicate with the appraisers, an apparently overloaded CAD web site has been periodically displaying error messages instead of providing property search results, since at least Friday. And early Tuesday morning, the CAD phone system didn’t appear to be working. For callers trying to reach CAD representatives with questions, the phone sounded as if it were ringing continuously, but no “hold” message was received, and no one answered the calls.
However, the CAD’s office phone index was in working order, for people who knew the names of employees there. Chief Appraiser Glen Whitehead, reached through the phone index, said he had been unaware of the phone snafu, and said CAD had ordered another phone line in anticipation of heavy phone traffic.
“I’ll have to get the IT department to look at it,” Whitehead said.
He added that, as in other years just before the tax protest deadline, his office has been “wall-to-wall people” since Friday. He anticipates large crowds at the CAD office through at least Monday.
Shortly after the call to Whitehead, it appeared phone calls again were being answered normally.
But the web site property search function remained broken as of mid-morning Tuesday. Visitors trying to find information on a particular property instead received the following message:
An error occurred while processing your request. Please contact your system administrator.
