An interview with Assessor-Recorder incumbent Richard Ford
Last Tuesday, I had the opportunity to speak with the current incumbent of the assessorrecorder office, Richard Ford. As his press coverage is somewhat sparse, I sought to obtain the basic outline of Ford's experience of the office, and to hear his vision for the future of the position. Ford spoke at length about the various procedural functions of the office, details which might sound like a lullaby to most residents of Lake County. In the spirit of brevity, I condensed the interview into just a few questions. I hope this interview gives voters a clearer conception of the assessor-recorder candidates they have to choose from as election day, once in the far distance, looms ever-closer.
Q
How did you develop an interest in politics?
A
I don't really have an interest in politics. In fact, I don't really like politics. I entered public office because seven years ago assessor-recorder Doug Wacker announced that he was going to retire. Two people with no financial experience entered the election to replace him. I talked to the second-in-command, Debbie Olsen, to encourage her to run. There were a ton of retirements about six years before that, so she barely had enough staff to close the roll. She told me that she couldn't run for assessor, because if she won, there wouldn't be anyone to cover her job. I was the assistant auditor-controller at the time, and I knew the value of the three financial offices. One weak link hurts the other, and then the rest of the county. So, on the last day, I pulled the papers. I don't consider myself a good politician, and I don't really want to be a good politician. I don't take endorsements— it's a non-partisan office and should be handled as such. Everyone should be treated fairly, regardless if you're a member of city council or a property owner. The assessor-recorder only becomes a political office when people try to influence the value of properties. Assessors in the past have gone to jail because they were caught giving favors.
Q
What does the job of the assessor-recorder entail? What kind of responsibilities does the office hold?
A
It's not for the faint of heart! On the assessor side, we close about $8.2 billion dollars worth of money. When I started, we closed about 6.6 billion dollars. The amount has increased primarily because we've caught up on a lot of properties that the office hadn't assessed in some time. We also do cadastral mapping. This kind of mapping pertains to property tax. We deal with business property tax, using various criteria to assess how much tax businesses around here should pay. We do residential and commercial, which are two different animals. We do possessory interest tax. We handle boats— we have one of the largest mounts of boats, because of our lake. We do aircraft, we do geothermal, we do audits… On the recorder side, we record documents. There are two basic functions of the office— we record documents, and then make them public. Most of our work in the office happens away from the counter. Only about 20% of our work occurs at the counter. Once we record a document, most people think the work is done, but there's still 80% left! Once we record a document, we index it, so it can be found within the index database. This is one reason why some procedures in our office take a long time— we don't release original documents until we know for certain that it's in the index. We make sure that original documents are properly indexed so that when you try and find your grant deed in 10 years from now, we can find it and pull it out. If we try to rush the process, there's a chance we might not be able to find your document when you need it. We also deal with vitals, which include births, deaths, and marriage licenses.
Q
What aspects of the assessorrecorder office would you like to improve, if re-elected? What is your long-term vision for the office?
A
My long-term vision… my intention was never to come into the office and be here until the day I die. We pay $20.89 for the entry-level Appraiser-1 job. With this kind of pay, we're not going to be attracting a whole lot of people. In order to get your base certification to take your first test, you either need a fouryear degree or four years of office experience. This makes it hard to attract people with experience. The only way I felt I could solve the staffing problem was to bring people in on the recorder side, develop them, let them sit there for a year or two, get those couple years out of the way, and then move them over to the appraiser side of things. Almost all of my appraisers have come from the recorder side. This is why it's taken a couple of years to rebuild. I intend to finish off what we started. We also have some permits to fix— we have about 4,000 of those left. After that, I intend to work on succession planning. Revenue and taxation code is very large, and there's a lot of information to it, and it takes decades to be a super-expert at it. As it stands now, we can only train on the tax roll once a year, so it'll take a few years before we can make someone proficient at closing the tax roll. I'd also like to focus on retaining the employees that we have. We try to bring in people with good attitudes. If you find someone that likes helping people and you give them technical training, they then apply their technical skills to helping people. I think people stay at jobs for different reasons. It's not always money. Sometimes it's how they're treated, sometimes it's the training they get, or how much they feel valued. Of course, you can't just work for free. We're also doing the best we can to make sure our guys are paid the best possible.
In regard to what I'd like to improve, we've improved a lot on the training and technical aspects of the office, and I'd like to continue doing that. On the appraiser side, I'd like to have everyone become an advanced appraiser and I'd like to have everyone pass the auditor appraiser exam. Eventually, I'd like everyone to be able to do every job in the office, at least on the assessor side.
On the recorder side… when I entered office, we only had one recorder that was certified, now we have eight. We have two new people and need to get them certified, but I intend to get them certified as well… When I first entered office, it was a much more handson experience. In my third year, we were down to one appraiser. Debby Olsen and I had to close the entire tax roll by ourselves. This wasn't ideal. We've built the staff back up since then, but we'd like to get to
the point where we can do more outreach. This is the normal cycle of building something— once you build something, you have to get it stable. The office was unstable when I started, but now it's much more stable. Now we can get more out there. It's hard to say you want to get more staff training in when you can't even close the tax roll.
Q
Both you and Ms.Lee advocate for more transparency within the office. What would improving the transparency of the office entail?
A
Transparency in the office comes in a certain form. First let me speak about what is and isn't transparent. As I told you, we do an opinion of value. As appraisers, we come to a reasoning and have to defend why we believe a piece of property is valued the way it is. We're not trying to gouge anyone. If you come and ask me how I came to a certain conclusion or opinion of value, I'll supply you with that information. Someone recently came to us with questions about a conclusion we made, and we supplied them with the information and calculations. If someone feels that we made a mistake, we're always open to hearing where we went wrong. Some things are confidential. For example, after the Valley Fire, several people came and asked us for the addresses of the destroyed properties. You won't get that from my office. All of the property owners' information is strictly theirs. Unless you can prove legal agency, you won't receive that kind of information from my office. You can see anything you want that's in public record, but all private information is confidential. I'm not totally sure why transparency has become a talking point of this election— I feel that our office is as transparent as it can be in a professional manner.
Andre Williams is a 20-yearold aspiring journalist and Lake County resident. Williams is the Record-Bee's editorial intern for Summer 2022. His column interviewing Ford's challenger for Assessor-Recorder Hannah Lee was printed on May 18 and can be read online at Record-Bee.com.