Public Service Opportunities
Unlike many elected offices, the County Assessor does not work to create public policy. The Assessor’s Office, codified in the original California Constitution of 1850, is purely administrative. Its core responsibility is to annually determine and record property assessment values used in calculation of property taxes. However, there are many discretionary duties that are left up to the judgment of the individual Assessors. This is because our forebears trusted their elected officials to work for the public good in whatever capacity they saw fit, responsive to the circumstances of their era.
We are now in the 2020s. The public trust that was invested in the office over 170 years ago has the opportunity to evolve in new ways to serve needs that were not envisioned even 50 years ago, let alone at the dawn of California statehood. Just as the Santa Clara Valley has evolved from orchards and agriculture to technology and innovation, the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office needs to evolve and innovate to meet the challenges of both the present and the future.
The Assessor serves as a custodian of information with a duty to share it under certain circumstances, and is also given discretion, with some legal restrictions, to provide that information generally to the public. One of the required duties is providing property owners with a statement of assessed value on their properties on a yearly basis. Another is maintaining a database of relevant information about characteristics of all assessable properties within the county. In the modern age of data analytics, a great deal of insightful statistics can be mined out of this data. Information that could be put to work in providing insights in numerous areas, though its usefulness in analyzing the housing crisis is of particular interest.
They say that knowledge is power, and the knowledge extracted from this data will be a powerful tool. Just one of the insights we could glean from this would be a countywide snapshot of the patterns of property ownership and usage, which would clearly reveal some of the contributing factors in the housing crisis. However, in Santa Clara County, this characteristics report is only available at an intimidating price. Unless the requester pays a phenomenal amount of money (over $47,000), they cannot receive this report. Most counties in the US provide this information for free not just to stakeholders such as nonprofit organizations & government agencies, but to anyone who wants a copy. In the counties that do charge a nominal fee for the data, their application for the data includes a section where one can request a fee waiver - Santa Clara County does not provide this option on its data request application. So even though California law explicitly allows Assessors to waive this fee, our county does not inform the public that this is even an option - one must independently know they have the right to ask for it, and even with the right to ask, the Assessor can legally decline requests arbitrarily. So, by creating an application where the only option to get the data is to pay $47,195.00 by cash or check (no credit cards) - an amount greater than the budget of many nonprofits - exactly who does this serve? It certainly is not the average resident of Santa Clara County who suffers the consequences of this artificial data void. My firm belief is that the cost charged for this data should be brought into conformity with the rest of the nation, and the Assessor’s Office adopt a publicly known policy of waiving the fee for any and all nonprofit and government agencies that request it.
Other opportunities are also available for better serving the property owners of Santa Clara County just in terms of convenience. Most are not aware of services that are provided by the Assessor’s Office. Who knew that you could request to meet with a certified appraiser to discuss concerns ranging from challenging an assessment value to finding out how to transfer your tax basis to a new property? The Assessor’s Office provides this service - and presently does not promote this fact. Considering the number of county residents who moved here from other states or nations, assuming that people know these services are available is a major disservice to our residents. Outreach is imperative. The minimum standard that most counties follow is to maintain online web pages where the Assessor’s Office details all of the services they offer concerning property ownership and purchase, as well as supplemental relevant information for first time property buyers. Though in 2022, it is now expected that Assessor’s Offices should have a robust social media presence that provides regular content about the Assessor’s Office services to the public. Additionally, outreach ought to be performed in ways that are responsive to our residents' linguistic diversity, so that any resident who has a need for our services can access them.
The pandemic has brought public awareness to online meeting forums such as Zoom, and this or a similar platform could be used to schedule remote meetings with people whose ability to travel to the County government offices is limited either by health, distance, or lack of transit. Just as we no longer pay our taxes with gold and silver coins as was the custom when the Assessor’s Office was established, we no longer need to be bound to older means of doing business. After all, Silicon Valley is at the heart of innovation!
The data and the services provided by the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office are ours: we paid for them with our taxes. They should be readily available to whomever has need of them. After all, public service is what it’s for!
