County Assessor has seen many changes over the years
Editor’s Note: This story is one in a series looking at local government, as well as how Yuma County’s cities and towns have grown and changed historically.
Yuma County Assessor Joe Wehrle has not been working for the county since its founding 153 years ago, but he has been there for nearly one-third of that time.
He’s held different positions, mostly within the assessor’s office, over the last 40 years, and served the county when it covered twice as much land, before residents of the northern section broke off and formed La Paz County in 1984.
“This was really funny, in 1982 we decided to canvass all of what is now La Paz County, we went door-to-door, and we didn’t realize it at the time that they were considering breaking off from Yuma County,” he said, working as the deputy assessor to then-Assessor Alberta Smith. “So we spent quite a bit of time up there, working door-to-door, relisting all the properties in northern Yuma County.
“When the county split, one of the ways that they split the assets between the two counties was based on the assessed valuation in each part of the county. Because we had just reappraised north Yuma County, we had greatly enhanced or increased the amount of assessed valuation in that part of the county,” bumping it up by $4 million in one year.
“They probably ended up with a little bit more than they should have, but it’s all good,” Wehrle said.
The division was probably the biggest single change of the county’s history, and a rare one at that. La Paz is still America’s second-youngest county, with the city of Broomfield, Colo., seceding from Boulder County in 2001.
Yuma County’s history goes back to 1863 and the drawing up of the first four counties in the new Arizona Territory. It had become an important location decades earlier as the only spot where the the-nun-tamed Colorado River could be safely crossed.
According to Yuma Sun stories written for the county’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2014, the first county seat was the gold-mining boomtown of La Paz, now a ghost town west of Quartzsite. It was moved to Yuma about 10 years later, and the breakaway county now based in Parker took the lost community’s name just over 100 years after that.
Population jumps
The county’s population grew from 15,000 in 1920 to 67,000 in 1970, bringing the county government along with it. But it was still relatively small during Wehrle’s first decade or two there, and unrecognizable in terms of technology.
“When I came to work for the county we had absolutely no computers. We did everything by hand, and the only computers we were using at the time was, the state of Arizona owned a computer system, and we would transmit our work to them on a daily basis, where they would keypunch it and send us back new printouts,” he said.
The county treasurer had no way to electronically collect and calculate money until 1992, the year Karen Fritz was elected treasurer, Wehrle said.
“When the IT department was created, it was just one guy. And his primary assignment was the treasurer’s computer, to make sure it ran. That’s all there was,” he said.
“We never led the pack in those sorts of things. We’ve always been probably a step or two behind, not wanting to be on the bleeding edge, we’ll let someone else get cut first,” he added. But there are now about 30 employees in the Information Technology department.
Wehrle elected
Wehrle was elected to his first term as county assessor in 1992.
“We had migrated into getting computer terminals in our office but we were still connected to that same computer in Phoenix, and did our own data entry and could run a limited amount of reports,” Wehrle said.
The assessor’s office took another 10 years to move onto its own financial system.
Besides the tools he’s given to do it, Wehrle said the work of the assessor’s office — valuing every land parcel in the county, forming the base on which tax assessments are based — started getting much more complicated a couple of years after he started working there.
“In my office in particular the property tax system was very simple when I came to work here in 1977. And it’s now one of the most complex property tax systems in the United States,” he said.
Evolution begins
The evolution began in 1979-80, when Arizona passed its version of California’s Proposition 13 budget and revenue limitations. “That’s when our hands got tied on how much we could increase our expenses from one year to the next, and how much we could increase our revenue,” Wehrle said.
Other new departments besides IT have sprung up as well, he said. “When I first came to work here we did not have a public defender and a legal defender, that work was done by all of the attorneys in town. The judge would just kind of like, say, ‘Mr. Smith, you’re going to represent this guy.’ It really was like that. God help the attorney who happened to be in court that day, he usually got picked on,” Wehrle said.
Financial Services became its own department as the budgeting process got longer and more complicated, and the Emergency Management department emerged about 15 years ago as public concerns grew about major disasters, both natural and manmade. The original parks department shut down in the 1980s, was resurrected about 20 years later but only lasted a few years, though it’s never been officially shut down.
Looking to future
As for the future, he doesn’t see any reunification with La Paz County, and no one has officially approached the county about the possibility.
“Just recently we heard rumblings of La Paz wanting to merge back with Yuma County, but La Paz is having some financial difficulties right now. I think that the reality of that happening is, nah, it’s not going to happen,” he said.
But Yuma County Board of Supervisors Chairman Tony Reyes said the cities within the county will continue to grow in the future, along with the unincorporated areas.
This will blur the lines between the jurisdictions and the kind of regulations they face.
“I think that’s going to be the challenge in the future, working with the cities. How do you work together to on these urbantype problems in rural areas?” Reyes said. Already, county and city regulations are becoming standardized in many areas, he added.
Yuma Sun staff writer Blake Herzog can be reached at (928) 539-6856 or bherzog@yumasun.com.