S.F. limbo on when property taxes due
Property owners in San Mateo County must pay the second installment of this year’s property tax bill by Monday to avoid penalties. In San Francisco, the deadline is in flux.
At the moment, San Francisco’s deadline is also Monday. At midnight Sunday, the deadline technically would move to June 1 because it’s tied to the county’s shelter-inplace order. A resolution introduced at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors would set a new deadline of May 15, but the supervisors won’t meet again to approve it until Tuesday.
“To avoid taxpayer confusion we would like everyone to assume that the tax deadline will be May 15,” said Molly Cohen, an acting policy director in San Francisco’s treasurertax collec
tor’s office.
San Francisco and San Mateo were the only two Bay Area counties that extended the usual April 10 deadline for paying the second installment of 201920 property taxes without a penalty. They encouraged people to pay if they could by mail, phone or online, and a large majority of tax payments have already come in.
The two counties took advantage of a state law that lets them extend the taxpayment deadline if their supervisors pass a resolution closing the county’s business offices. That extends the deadline until the end of the day the offices reopen.
Both counties passed resolutions that closed their tax collector’s offices to the public until their county health officers ended their shelterinplace orders. That closed their offices for inperson payments, and thus their secondpayment deadlines, until Monday, the day after their current shelterinplace orders were set to expire.
However, this week six Bay Area counties including San Mateo and San Francisco extended their orders again. Instead of expiring at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, they will now expire at 11:59 p.m. on May 31.
To prevent that extension from postponing the property tax deadline, San Mateo’s supervisors amended their earlier resolution on April 21 so that the closure of the tax collector’s walkin property tax payment locations is no longer tied to the duration of the county health officer’s order. It set May 4 as the new deadline “regardless of whether the order is extended.”
Its tax collector offices in Redwood City, Half Moon Bay and South San Francisco will be fully staffed and open to the public for cashonly tax payments Thursday, Friday and Monday. On Tuesday, the offices will go back to having a “skeleton crew,” with most employees working from home, San Mateo County TreasurerTax Collector Sandie Arnott said.
San Francisco’s existing resolution states that “Tax payments will be accepted without penalty on the next business day the office is open to the public following termination or expiration of the (shelterinplace) order,” therefore “the Board of Supervisors hereby direct that the Treasurer & Tax Collector City Hall location be closed for the acceptance of inperson tax payments for the duration of the order, as may be extended at the health officer’s discretion.”
Because the current shelterinplace order is in effect through Sunday night, the San Francisco payment deadline remains Monday. As of midnight Sunday, the deadline would be extended until June 1, the day after the new order expires. If the supervisors approve the new resolution, the deadline would become May 15.
On Wednesday morning, the Treasurer & Tax Collector’s website still said the deadline was Monday. Later, that was changed to say a resolution introduced at Tuesday’s supervisors meeting would reopen the treasurer’s office in City Hall on May 15 and set the property tax deadline to May 15.
“Those that can afford to and would like to end the mystery and avoid any potential missteps in relation to San Francisco’s changing deadlines should simply pay the taxes as soon as possible,” said Bradley Marsh, a tax attorney with Greenberg Traurig. “Those that are not able to pay online or by mail and can’t yet afford to pay the taxes should instead keep their eye on” the new resolution. “If May 15 is the new deadline, every effort should be made to pay on or before then. If taxes are not paid by whatever the eventual deadline will be, San Francisco has stated that it will review penalty abatement requests on a case by case basis.”
Despite the deadline extensions, both counties have received most of their secondhalf property tax payments. In San Francisco, about $226 million or 14% of the total $1.66 billion due is outstanding. Including the first payment that was due Dec. 10, San Francisco has received 93% of the amount owed for the full 201920 fiscal year.
In San Mateo County, the amount of secondhalf payments outstanding is $151.6 million, or 8.2% of the $1.475 billion due. For the full year, 5.1% has not been paid.