By Rusty Nixon Correspondent
PLYMOUTH — Marshall County Assessor Deb Dunning is running to stand still, thanks to the Indiana General Assembly.
State law currently says that reassessment must begin by July 1 for Marshall County. A bill that would have changed reassessment to next year and made it a five-year rolling reassessment process was killed in the Indiana House. However, Governor Mitch Daniels has ordered a special session and legislators have vowed to bring up the bill again before the end of June.

With reassessment currently mandated on July 1, Dunning is placed in the position of needing to contract the services, with the possibility that everything will change just weeks before the deadline, or wait and risk missing that deadline.
Dunning has chosen the proactive approach.
She came before the Marshall County Commissioners Monday to seek approval to begin negotiations with vendors for the reassessment contract, hoping to have a deal in place for the services in the next two weeks.
A certain item up for negotiation — as advised by County Attorney Jim Clevenger — would be the right of the county to void the contract, or renegotiate it, should the bill pass the Indiana Assembly.
If reassessment is put off until 2010 and the process changed, Dunning would like the ability to renegotiate the contract, since her office undertaking some of the work would then be a possibility.
The result would be considerable savings to the county.
“It puts us behind again because we don’t know what the rules are going to be,” said Dunning. “A quarter of the work has to be done by October of this year. We have to get started.”