Kodiak Borough Tax Software Switch Runs Months Behind Schedule

The Kodiak Island Borough adopted Ordinance FY 2027-02 on June 4, certifying the 2026 property tax roll and setting mill rates for borough service areas. With the levy decision made, the remaining challenge is operational: whether borough staff can complete the transition to Tyler Technologies property assessment software in time to process and send tax bills by the state-required July 1 deadline. Staff are targeting a July 31 go-live for commercial properties in the new system and have kept the legacy Harris platform running in parallel as a fallback.

The transition has stretched well past its original timeline. At the June 4 regular meeting, an assembly member pressed borough staff on the delay. "My memory is that we were supposed to adopt Tyler last September, and it's taken until June, and we still have some issues with of that," the member said.

Borough Manager Williams pointed to the legacy system the borough is replacing. "We have been on an antiquated system that has been limping along for years," Williams said. "In the perfect world, we would have just been able to take all the data from our old system, send it over to the new system, and put it in. And it just was not that simple." Personnel turnover compounded the problem, including the loss of IT staff familiar with the old datasets. "You just perfect storm all of those things together and it's taking longer," Williams said.

Williams said staff are working to meet the billing deadline. The borough and Tyler have dedicated teams on the effort, she said. Williams also noted that other Alaska communities have struggled through similar Tyler conversions, while many others have implemented the platform successfully.

Backup Plan

The borough has a contingency if the new system is not ready in time. "We have a backup plan in the event that Tyler doesn't work for Levy because we have kept that parallel system for Harris this whole time," Williams said. "If Tyler doesn't work, we'll be trying to pull away from Tyler really fast after Levy because then their system is useless to us."

"I don't think we picked the wrong computer program," Williams said. "I think that our conversion was a lot harder than what they're used to."

The assessing team has been working on the conversion while the borough maintains its legacy system through the transition. The July 31 commercial-property go-live target and the July 1 tax-billing requirement mean the coming weeks will determine whether Tyler or Harris processes the 2026 levy run.