Dane Garber has seen every nook, cranny, wide spot in the road and dirt track there is in Clark County, both from the ground and from a bird’s eye view.

Garber, a life-long Clark County resident, is a deputy in the Clark County property valuation administrator office. Garber started there 25 years ago as a field agent responsible for physically inspecting every residence in Clark County.

The office is charged with assessing fair market value on property as well as vehicles, he said. Those assessments are the base for property taxes and the bills which will be prepared later this year.

Garber started working in the office in 1994 as a field representative, which involved going to each residence, taking photographs and measuring the houses and structures.

Seeing a strange person taking pictures may put some people on edge.

“I’ve never had a problem,” he said. “I think a lot of it is how you approach people. “Being overly friendly to start with and explaining why you’re there is the key.”

Currently, Garber does most of the mapping for the office, which uses paper documents and aerial photographs to provide a general idea of where property lines fall throughout Clark County.

“We’re not surveyors and we’re not lawyers, so this map we’re creating is for identification purposes only,” he said.

Every two years, the office hires a company to fly over all of Clark County to take photographs of every inch within the county. Those images are then compiled to make one master image of the county showing each property.

The image includes property owners’ names as well as numbers for the plat and deed for each tract, he said. That’s helpful if a person wants to have their property surveyed, he said, because they need the deeds and plats for all surrounding properties as well for accuracy.

Most of the time, he works with surveyors and attorneys, as well as the general public in documenting property. It’s how he meet his wife Heather Baldwin, he said. She is an engineer and surveyor, and was in the office multiple times getting various documents through her work and for her father’s company.

“I love actually helping people with their problems,” Garber said. “It’s kind of like a puzzle and getting to the end of the puzzle.”