MOULTRIE — Colquitt County government is considering adding technology with artificial intelligence that can determine, from aerial imaging, when property owners have made additions or improvements to their property.

Colquitt County Board of Tax Assessors Chief Appraiser Jim Mac Booth spoke to the County Commission last week about approving an EagleView contract. EagleView is an aerial imaging and geospatial data gathering program that was used in 2022 to photograph the entire county. Its images are available on QPublic, which allows the public to view them.

“EagleView, we approved this in 2022 and had our first fly in done. It was $16.5K and we kind of payed it out over three years. It’s come time to do another fly over,” said County Administrator Chas Cannon.

Cannon went on to say that Booth wanted to do another add-in to the EagleView contract called the ChangeFinder, which is an AI program that can detect all buildings that were added, changed or demolished since the last fly over. It can also detect swimming pools.

Booth said, “The ChangeFinder will pick-up … There is an AI technology to pick-up the different shapes of the buildings that are on the property.”

He went on to say that the program would let the board of tax assessors know, for example, if an extra room was added on to a house.

He also said that it would help them find property owners who did not get a permit for their construction, if a permit was required for it.

“It will be cheaper than hiring one person to go out and check everything. I believe it will help us a lot,” Booth said.

He said that it would also help with getting one-third of the county’s properties appraised each year, since the State now requires it after a recent amendment that voters passed in November.

“Because, the new law they’ve added that into it, that we now have to physically check what they want, physically check one-third of the county every year,” he said.

Booth said that the State was going to count the county’s sales splits, appeals and permits in that property count, so that they could get close to or at least that amount every year.

He also asked the commissioners to think about allowing him to get hand-held tablets that they field appraisers could use to get all the information that they needed on a property before returning to the office.

He added that they wouldn’t have to spend another 20 minutes per parcel entering the information a second time into the computer in the office.

“They can spend more time per day out in the field seeing parcels. And that will also increase our count of how many we can see each year,” Booth said.

Going back to the ChangeFinder add-on to the EagleView contract, he said that once a fly over was done early in 2025, taking new aerial photos of the county, he’ll be able to get the new information. There will be a print-out, he said, of all the properties that have changed from the northeast of the county to the southwest of the county.

“We have whole subdivisions, now, that have 20 new houses in them that we don’t have pictures of,” Booth said and added that meant that there were no photos of them on QPublic.

Cannon said that the EagleView contract would be on the next commission meeting’s agenda for approval.