What are the responsibilities and job description for the Applied Economist / Valuation Analyst position at Warren County, KY Property Valuation Administrator?
Applied Economist / Valuation Analyst
Warren County Property Valuation Administrator's Office — Bowling Green, Kentucky
This is not a typical government job.
If you're an economist, data analyst, or quantitatively-minded problem solver who wants to see your models actually matter, decide something, change something, defend something, keep reading.
The Warren County PVA office is constitutionally responsible for valuing every parcel of property in one of Kentucky's fastest-growing counties: 56,000 parcels, 140,000 residents, valued annually, physically inspected every four years. That's a serious applied-economics problem, and we're building the team and systems to solve it well.
What you'd actually do
- Build and refine valuation models for residential and commercial property — mass appraisal, market analysis, sales ratio studies. Your models set real assessments on real property.
- Analyze data at scale. Sales data, parcel characteristics, market trends, neighborhood delineation. If you like finding signal in messy real-world data, there's no shortage of it here.
- Defend your work. Negotiate directly with property owners and professional tax representatives, and present and defend valuations before local appeals boards. You'll learn to explain your valuation to a skeptical audience, a skill most analysts never develop.
- Get out from behind the desk. Field inspections of property across the county, including evaluating whether properties meet criteria for tax exemptions. You'll know this county parcel by parcel.
- Help build the office itself. We're actively modernizing how we work. Processes aren't set in stone, if you see a better way, you'll have room to build it.
Who thrives here
- A self-starter who doesn't need a procedure manual to make progress (good, because we're still writing some of them)
- Someone with strong critical thinking and a systems-level view, you see how data, law, markets, and people connect
- Flexible and comfortable with ambiguity. We're a growing office in a growing county, figuring things out as we scale
- Interested in public service with visible impact. Property assessment funds schools, roads, and local government. Fairness and accuracy here matter to every household in the county
- Comfortable with the fact that this is an elected office, the work sits at the intersection of analysis, law, and local civic life, and that's part of what makes it interesting
Background we're looking for
A master's degree in applied economics, economics, statistics, data science, mathematics, physics, computer science, public policy, or a related quantitative field is a natural fit for this work, but we care far more about what you can do than where you learned to do it. If you don't have a master's, or any degree at all, but this posting made something click for you, if you read the description above and thought "I could sink my teeth into that" , we want to hear from you. Show us the skillset, the curiosity, and the willingness to grow with us, and the credentials take care of themselves.
Experience with statistical software (R, Python, Stata, SQL, or similar) and data analysis is a strong plus. Prior assessment or appraisal experience is not required; we'll teach you the property side if you bring the analytical side.
The honest pitch
This job is what happens when applied economics meets local government at street level. You'll build models, then look the affected property owner in the eye. You'll do econometrics in the morning and walk a farm in the afternoon. It's rigorous, public-facing, and occasionally political. We won't pretend it's never boring, there will be weeks of grinding through spreadsheets. But those stretches are punctuated by genuinely intense periods: appeals season, negotiations, deadlines that matter, and the work you do directly shapes how fairly a rapidly growing community shares its tax burden.
Who you'd work for
You'd report directly to the elected PVA, whose own background is software development, with a degree in mathematics and a minor in physics. That matters: this office is led by someone who thinks in systems, values good analysis, and will actually understand (and challenge) your work.
One thing worth being upfront about: in Kentucky, deputies serve at the pleasure of the elected official. In practice, that means this is a relationship built on trust, and it runs both directions. We'll invest real time in developing you, training, credentials, room to grow into bigger responsibility, and in return we're looking for someone who wants to commit and build with us. Deputies here aren't cogs in a bureaucracy; you'd be a trusted right hand in a small team building something that matters.
To get your resume noticed: Skip the cover letter. Instead, send your resume to the contact email on our website along with a short note , a few paragraphs is plenty, about a messy, real-world problem you solved, improved, or made sense of using data. What was the problem? What did you actually do? What changed because of it? It doesn't have to be from a job, a class project, a side project, or something you fixed just because it bugged you all count. This note is the first thing we read, and it will matter more than your resume format. Applications without it will tell us you didn't read this far, and reading carefully is part of the job.
Pay: $40,000.00 - $55,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Dental insurance
- Flexible schedule
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
- Paid time off
- Professional development assistance
- Vision insurance
Work Location: In person
Salary : $40,000 - $55,000