ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – A property tax freeze is currently on pause for St. Louis County seniors.
The county said the system is getting an upgrade and will be back up Monday morning. Since the application system launched on Oct. 1, more than 30,000 people have applied.
“We expected a pretty significant first few days crush, and we saw that. We worked beyond normal operating hours the first two or three, but it has tapered off,” St. Louis County Director of Revenue Tony Smee said.
Along with the 30,000 applications that have already been submitted, another 100,000 seniors could apply before the June deadline.
“We just had such a high number of applications, and the applications themselves are data rich. They’re images of documents and lots of documents,” he said.
The documents and images take up a lot of space in the computer system, which is where the system upgrade will help. It will also cut down application times by half.
“When people come in and they have everything, you know, they’ve read the documentation ahead of time, they know what they need to come with. It is a four or five minute process,” Smee added.
The pause on applications gives Smee’s team the weekend to look over some of the existing applications.
“We’re taking time, since we’ve got the system shut down, to actually do some work in the system and start eliminating some of those duplicate applications,” he said.