From Paper to Progress: How Wright County Digitized Its Abatement Process

A property tax abatement request sounds routine until you picture the person behind it. Maybe a Halloween decoration sparked a house fire that took more than half of a home. Maybe a tax court order needs to be reflected in what a family owes. Whatever the reason, that resident used to have one option: drive to the county office, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and fill out one of five paper forms by hand.

That was the reality in Wright County, Minnesota, before its assessor’s department partnered with its ECM team, DataBank, and Jadu to rebuild the abatement process from the ground up. In a recent webinar, Beyond Go-Live: Turning Ideas Into Impact, Wright County’s Christina Klaphake and Misty Thibodeaux walked through what that transformation actually took, alongside Jadu’s Nic Trautman and DataBank’s Adam Herrmann. The result is a case study in what it looks like to move a government service from paper to progress without losing sight of the people it serves.

The Weight of a Paper Trail

Wright County is the ninth largest county in Minnesota, spanning 714 square miles and serving a population of more than 145,000 that’s projected to grow by roughly 23.5% by 2030. An abatement, in plain terms, is a resident’s request to have their property tax bill reviewed, whether the cause is a natural disaster, a house fire, a tax court order, or a homestead credit filing.

Before the project, that request touched three departments and anywhere from three to eight staff members before it was resolved. Residents often told their story at one counter only to be sent to another to repeat it. Paperwork moved desk to desk, and when it was misplaced or simply hard to track down, nobody, staff included, could say where it stood. The result was an average processing time of 30 to 34 weeks and a process that, as Klaphake put it, wasn’t building trust or confidence with the community it served.

Finding the Right Project to Start With

Interestingly, abatement wasn’t where Wright County’s digital portal ambitions began. Klaphake and Thibodeaux were first approached by Health and Human Services, which needed a way for clients to submit documents and check status without adding to already rising call volumes. After seeing the Hyland Content Portal powered by Jadu demonstrated at a prior CommunityLIVE conference, the team recognized its potential, particularly its native Section 508 and ADA compliance, a legislative requirement for public sector agencies.

But the Health and Human Services use case turned out to be too large a first step for a brand-new platform. Rather than shelve the idea, the team looked for a better-scoped pilot and found it in the assessor’s office. The abatement process needed exactly what the portal offered: a way for residents to submit applications and required documentation electronically, visibility across departments, automated notifications, and reporting for leadership. It also came with a firm deadline, full implementation by the end of 2025, which kept the project focused.

Building One Form Out of Five

The team consolidated five separate paper applications into a single dynamic form in Jadu Central, requiring applicants to create an account so they could later check their status online. On the back end, form data was mapped to OnBase WorkView attributes and keywords, roughly 50 in total, so information collected in Jadu flowed directly into the Unity Form staff already used in OnBase, along with any supporting documentation the resident attached.

From there, the application entered a single workflow lifecycle built around seven queues, replacing what had been a manual handoff between desks and departments. Staff could now see exactly where an application stood and route it forward with ad hoc tasks rather than physically carrying a folder from office to office. The team also simplified something residents had been quietly frustrated by for years: approval and denial letters that previously arrived from two departments at different times now come from a single department, generated through document composition and delivered by mail or email depending on department preference.

Reporting was kept intentionally simple at launch, an exportable report on tax reductions, application volume, and abatement types rather than a full dashboard, with a more robust reporting view planned as a next step.

Results Measured in Weeks, Not Months

Seven months after go-live, Wright County had received 49 abatement applications electronically. The original goal was to cut the 30 to 34 week processing window by 25%. One case reviewed by the team, submitted in January and requiring a full property inspection before approval, was resolved in eight weeks, a reduction of more than 75%.

The gains extended beyond speed. With shared visibility into every application, staff can now cover for one another during turnover or shifting priorities without the process stalling. Denials caused by missing documentation, once a routine and disappointing outcome, can be caught and addressed earlier. And county leadership, for the first time, has real data on how the program is performing, insight they can use to shape policy going forward.

What Made It Work

Asked what they’d tell other organizations starting a similar project, Trautman pointed to requirements gathering. Talking to each department in detail up front, before a single screen is built, saves teams from having to backtrack once staff see the product for the first time and raise use cases nobody accounted for. Klaphake agreed, adding that the preparation work only pays off if the department stays engaged throughout, so the people who understand the process best are available to answer questions as they come up. That engagement, she noted, is also what carried the assessor’s office through a genuine process change: staff who once relied on a physical paper trail had to trust a new system, and their willingness to adapt was central to the project’s success.

Wright County isn’t stopping with abatement. With a mandate to make its public-facing Unity forms ADA compliant, the county plans to extend the Jadu-powered portal to its most heavily used forms first, then work down to lower-volume ones across its other departments. As Trautman noted, the model has applications well beyond assessor’s offices, from licensing and permitting to onboarding and vendor portals, across government, higher education, and beyond.

Turning Your Own Paper Trail Into Progress

Wright County’s story is a reminder that modernization doesn’t require solving every problem at once. It requires finding the right process, the right partner, and the discipline to gather requirements before writing a line of workflow. If your organization is sitting on a paper-based process that’s costing your team time and your constituents’ trust, DataBank can help you find your own version of the right place to start.