By Melanie Speicher

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SIDNEY — John Coffield is ready to put away the tools he has worked with for the past 6 1/2 years as Shelby County Treasurer. No more calculators, mailing letters to property owners telling them when their property taxes are due and no more business hours.

Coffield was honored with a retirement party on Tuesday, March 26. His final day in office is March 29. His official term as treasurer ends in September 2025 and the Shelby County Republican Party will be selecting his successor to finish his unexpired term.

He was elected to office in November 2016 but wasn’t sworn in as treasurer until September 2017 as the term for the office doesn’t begin until the September following the November General Election.

“I was sworn in 10 months after I was elected,” said Coffield. “I had almost forgotten I had been elected to office.”

While the Republican Party has replaced Coffield for the final 18 months of his term, Todd Lotz was on the March Primary Election as the sole person running for the seat. He will be unopposed in November and will take office in September 2025.

Coffield said serving the county as treasurer was his second career. He retired from banking where he spent 37 years with Bank One and then JP Morgan Chase.

“I spent 17 years in Columbus, from 1992-2009,” said Coffield. “In 2009, I came back home to Sidney. My dad was having health problems at the time.”

Coffield said he worked for six year from home, but traveled frequently to meet with people in his department.

When he was elected, Coffield had various ideas and plans to bring the treasurer’s office into the modern world of technology.

“I had a new real estate software program installed,” said Coffield. “There was a 1970s doss-based system when I was elected. It was an archaic system.

“The new system was friendly to look at and easy to navigate,” he said. “We are now able to all parcels (owned by the same person) into a cart to change the address one time.”

Coffield also added the capability of the office to accept credit cards on the computer.

“People can now pay online,” said Coffield. “It’s for the property owner’s convenience. The person can pay with either a credit card or an e-check.”

The fee for paying by e-check, he said, is $1.30 per check, while if a person pays by credit card, they are charged a percentage of the amount owed/paid.

“More people use the e-check,” he said. “We have about 5% of the property owners who pay online.

“A number of people still pay in cash,” he said. “We’ll have people come in and count out the $100 bills to pay their property taxes. “W had $63,000 in cash during the last tax season. We take in $1 million a year in cash.

“The majority of people still pay by checks and the majority of bills still come in the mail. We just sent out 28,000-29,000 parches in bills.”

A new scanner process has also be implemented in the treasurer’s office.

“We scan the check and the payment stub,” said Coffield. “The system reads it and matches them up.It’s amazing what the reader can do. We can process 3,000 parcels in one day, before it was less than 1,000.

“When I first started in the treasurer’s office when the Feb. 14 tax deadline hit, we would be working on matching checks with payment stubs until the end of the month. This year, we were done on Feb. 17.”

The scanner, he said, has increased the efficiency of the office. The process sends the payment file to the real estate system and the check file transmits the check electronically to the bank.

“With the old system, we had to key in everything,” said Coffield.

The office has also implemented the use of excel documents, which allows them to document all money taken in by the office and money taken out.

“We used to have to write it all out by hand,” he said. A copy of the work is sent to the auditor’s office.

With his banking background, Coffield prioritized the investments for the county funds.

“When I ran, I talked about change,” he said. “Nobody likes change, but it’s good. You get set in your wants and you don’t want to change. I looked at the county’s investments. Last year, we made $1.4 million off of investments. That’s the most the county has made in 20 years. The commissioners really like me.”

He said some of the county’s money is invested with Star Ohio, which has seen the return on investments increase from $12,000 a year to $94,000 in the month of January 2024 alone. Funds from the investments go into the county’s general fund, said Coffield.

Another change to the office is the collection of past due property taxes.

“One of my goals when I started, was to try to reduce the amount of delinquent taxes that were owed. When I started, the amount of delinquent taxes were about 2.25%. At the end of our collection period in December of last year, delinquency stood at 1.64%,” said Coffield.

“Doug Ahlers, Land Bank executive director, and I have worked well together to clean up over 100 abandoned and blighted properties across the county over the past six years,” he said. “All in all, I believe I was able to accomplish all of the goals that I set for myself when I started this position. It’s now time for someone with fresh ideas to move the office forward.”

As he enters retirement, Coffield is looking forward to traveling more. He is an active member of the Kiwanis Club of Sidney and services as the Division 3 lieutenant governor. He is the treasurer of the Sidney Streets and safety Plus Campaign and is also the treasure of the Big Brothers Big Sisters and Shelby and Darke Counties. He is the Big 4 Passenger Station Preservation group’s treasurer.

“My retirement gift to myself is a 49-day cruise,” said Coffield. It will start in Athens, Greece and go to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’ll visit 11 countries and we’ll be sailing for six days across the Atlantic Ocean. We’ll see how that goes.”