Race between Ford, Lee focuses attention on Assessor-Recorder’s Office
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Assessor-Recorder’s Office is an agency that plays an important role in county government finances, and it’s not often one that many people think about unless they’re getting a property tax bill late in the year.
The elected position that runs the office is not often contested in elections unless there is a retirement.
However, 2022 is different, and this year the assessor-recorder’s race is one of the strongly contested races on the June 7 primary ballot.
Incumbent Richard Ford is seeking a third term, and he’s being challenged by Hannah Faith Lee, a local businesswoman and deputy county public guardian.
The Assessor-Recorder’s Office is a key fiscal office for the county of Lake, and one that oversees a main source of general fund money — the property tax roll.
Ford said the property tax roll supplies between 50 and 55% of the general fund — the county receives approximately 25 cents of every property tax dollar — and in so doing is a key revenue source for local schools, cities and the county itself. He calls it a tiny office with a “big bang” financially.
This is only the third time in 20 years that the assessor-recorder’s job has been contested.
The last time was in 2014, when Ford won election over Sorhna Li Jordan, both of whom were seeking to succeed longtime Assessor-Recorder Doug Wacker. In 2002 Wacker won a contested race over Michael Wochna, a year after the Board of Supervisors appointed Wacker to succeed Dan Irwin.
This year, key issues in the race revolve around increased property tax bills that 1,000 county residents received last year due to restored base year values under Proposition 8, which had given property tax relief as a result of the recession, and recording times for documents, which local real estate professionals in particular have complained about since the county allowed a temporary Friday closure of offices two years ago. Those closures have since been lifted.
Ford and Lee said in interviews with Lake County News that neither had originally intended to run for political office.
Ford said he first ran for the office eight years ago in response to a retirement and Lee is challenging Ford because she said she’s responding to how he’s handled issues like adjusting values under Proposition 8 due to an improved market.
Lee’s background, experience and accomplishments
Lee, 34, grew up in Sonoma County and moved to Lake County with her family in 2005, at age 18.
Her father is a contractor who at that time built spec homes but switched to general construction after the housing crash. Her parents and a sister still live in Lake County. Lee and her fiance, Matt Sesser, live in Kelseyville.
She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and business management from Marymount California University, associates degrees in business and income tax preparation, and multiple certifications in accounting and income tax preparation from Yuba Community College, now Woodland Community College.
Lee said she worked in fast food — specifically, at Pizza Hut — and then started a career as a veterinary technician, before moving on to social work.
She participated in committees with other counties for Adult Protective Services and In-Home Supportive Services and was part of a successful effort to provide emergency housing for elders in abusive situations.
She and Sesser purchased Main Street Bicycles on Jan. 1, 2021, changing its name to Konocti Bicycles.
The business has had significant negative publicity due to its previous owner’s prosecution for child pornography, but Lee said they were able to get through that challenge to relaunch and rebrand the business successfully.
Lee currently works as a deputy public guardian for the county of Lake, taking care of more than 80 individuals and their estates, with totals ranging from $5,000 to $1.5 million.
In that capacity, she’s held accountable by the courts, and she follows the probate code to the letter. She said she oversees all aspects of the lives of the people in her care.
“I’m not just a social worker,” she said. “I bring the numbers side as well as the human side.”
Ford’s background, experience and accomplishments
Ford, 52, grew up in Southern California. He is married with two sons and has been a longtime scoutmaster and assistant scoutmaster.
He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting and a Master’s in Business Administration degree, as well as state of California appraisal, auditor-appraisal and advanced appraiser licenses.
He held various accounting jobs and worked for a Fortune 500 company. After going through two large mergers, he decided to seek work in the government.
About 10 years ago Lake County Auditor-Controller/County Cathy Saderlund hired him as her assistant-auditor controller. Two years later, Doug Wacker announced he planned to retire from the assessor-recorder’s job.
While Ford had never planned to run for office, he believed he had the financial background and skills to hold the office, so he ran and won.
During his first two terms, Ford said he has built up a staff after longtime challenges with hiring, which is a countywide problem.
When he started nearly eight years ago, there were four full-time appraisers in his office; now there are seven. He also had no auditor-appraisers when he began and now there are three, with one scheduled to be certified next year. There was one advanced appraiser and now there are four; next year, one more will be certified.
He said that during his tenure, the property tax roll has increased from $6.6 billion to $8.2 billion.
Overall, Ford said his office monitors in its system about 100,000 Items; that includes approximately 80,000 properties and 20,000 recordings of documents.
Ford said he and his staff had a large work backlog when he began as assessor-recorder; he estimates they have gotten through 75% of it.
That backlog and what it means has been a frequent talking point during the campaign.
In response to a question about the backlog’s specifics, Ford said the backlog originally included 10,800 properties that needed to have a Proposition 8 review, with that number now down to 4,000; 350 assessments appeals, which have been reduced to 23; and 7,000 newly permitted properties that have to be entered into the system, which is now down to 4,000.
He said he’s turned his office into a learning environment, with daily training and an approach that emphasizes learning from mistakes, not getting in trouble for them. As a result, he said things are getting done faster and more efficiently. “Our accuracy has increased substantially.”
They’ve also reduced the number of assessment appeals. Previously, there were 300 to 400 a year. Now, Ford said it’s down to about two dozen. They’re willing to take additional information from property owners and look at ways to make their assessments more accurate in making final determinations.
When Ford first arrived in office, the Lake County Assessor-Recorder's Office was not self-funded by fees, as is the case for most other assessor-recorder’s offices statewide.
Instead, the office needed to draw $160,000 a year from the general fund because its fees were too low by about half, and were the lowest in the state, Ford said.
By raising the fees, Ford said his department became self-funded and is now about to give back $20,000 to the general fund.
Reasons for running
Incumbents bring with them a record of performance and experience, which can also lead to criticism. This campaign season, Ford has been criticized for how he’s handled certain issues, from updating property values under Proposition 8, to recording documents for real estate transactions, to questions about why fire survivors’ property values haven’t been adjusted.
He said he’s tried to answer that criticism and clean up misunderstandings, but he added, “I’m probably the worst politician you've ever seen, to be honest.”
Asked why he is running again, he called it “a very good question,” noting that it’s a tough job and during his tenure there have been no “normal years” with so many fires, floods and now the pandemic.
During the Ranch and River fires in 2018, when all of Lakeport was evacuated, his staff had to grab laptops and set up a separate office at the Social Services Department in Lower Lake.
“We’ve become a lot more nimble technology-wise,” he said.
He added, “I’ve got the best staff in the world.”
He points to the work he’s done so far as a reason for continuing in office. Along with that, Ford said seeking a third term is a matter of “wanting to finish the job, really,” to finish the work he started nearly eight years ago, including whittling down a backlog of thousands of properties needing Proposition 8 value adjustments and getting the office on a stronger technological footing.
For challengers, like Lee, the biggest criticism is usually lack of experience. She said she believes she can learn the job and get up to speed in order to make improvements.
Lee said she wasn’t looking to run for a political position at all; however, there were two prompts that led her to putting her name on the ballot.
One of those issues arose last fall, when new property tax bills went out two weeks before the due date.
For approximately 1,000 property owners, that’s when they found out that property tax relief that they had received through Proposition 8 had ended and that their bills had gone up significantly.
Lake County News spoke to several property owners who got big bills last fall and who didn’t remember having asked the county for the temporary reduction in the first place.
Under Proposition 8, properties that qualify are given a temporary reduction in their taxable value as a result of their properties’ market value being less than the assessed value.
He said that during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, before he took office, there were many applications for relief through Proposition 8, and that the reductions had ended due to the improved market.
Ford explained it this way: Someone bought a house in 2008 for $500,000 and in 2010 the house was only worth $200,000. As a result, the property tax value was reduced to $200K at that time.
When the market recovered and their house value was worth $400,000, “We are obligated by law to restore their value” up to the correct amount, Ford said.
Lee said she’s not contesting that restoring those property tax values were necessary. “It had to be done.”
What she does take issue with is that there should have been communication months in advance between the Assessor-Recorder’s Office and the affected property owners, some of whom she said are on fixed incomes. Finding out at the last minute didn’t give them a chance to rework their budgets before the holidays, she said.
Many people went on social media to discuss the matter. “Communication would have been key in helping those individuals,” Lee said.
She said many of those impacted didn’t remember asking for such a temporary reduction. “I don’t remember what I did 12 years ago.”
People familiar with Lee’s work as a deputy public guardian asked her to consider running for assessor-recorder. Lee said she then sat down and spoke to Sesser about it and the potential impact on their life together.
Ultimately, she made the decision to run because she believes change needs to occur. It’s something she said she feels strongly about, because she believes that communication, service and accountability need to be brought back to the office.
“It needs to be addressed immediately,” she said.
Lee said she’s not just a social worker, she has the ability to translate the numbers in ways people can understand.
Ford responds to criticisms
One of the recurring complaints against Ford that he said he has worked to dispel revolves around Friday closures that had involved all county offices in the courthouse in an effort to let departments catch up because of the county government’s job vacancy rate, which has remained above 20%, as well as workloads exacerbated by the wildland fires and economic challenges.
Ford told Lake County News that the Friday closures did benefit the office greatly by allowing staff to catch up.
The office closures began in August 2018, after the Board of Supervisors voted to support a request by then-County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson to start a pilot program to close county offices — particularly those in and around the Lake County Courthouse in Lakeport — to the public on Fridays.
During a November 2020 meeting, the supervisors voted unanimously to phase out the Friday closures by the end of March 2021. During that discussion, several real estate professionals spoke to the board about the challenges the closures had created for their profession. At the same time, neither Ford nor any members of his staff were present for the discussion or could be reached to take part in it.
Numerous letters to the editor from some of those same business owners this campaign season have pointed to those issues and have continued to criticize Ford for the office closures — which ended more than a year ago.
Ford said he’s tried to counter the belief that the closures are continuing, along with complaints by real estate agents and brokers that his office only records documents at certain times of the day. He said he’s sent out a white paper to real estate agents in an attempt to dispel that idea.
As explanation, Ford said title company recording appointments were reduced from two times per day to one per day based on the COVID-19 protocols implemented by the Board of Supervisors. As soon as the protocols were lifted, the title company recording appointments were restored to two times per day, he said.
“The only reason we have appointments is to accommodate the public and the title companies at the same time,” Ford said. “The public traditionally comes during lunch hours. We schedule the title companies an appointment before and after the lunch hours. This allows both the public and title companies to get processed quickly and reduce wait times for both.”
In response to criticisms about the length of time it takes to turn around documents for recording, Ford said his office has to follow state rules and internal controls and make sure to properly follow the process to protect documents.
Ford said he believed he’d had a good relationship with real estate agents and has tried to keep them “as abreast of the information as possible,” and so he’s been puzzled by their criticism of his performance.
Lee said the issues with the real estate community boiled down, again, to a breakdown in communication that Ford could have explained to the community.
She said she’s also spoken to fire survivors who have told her that they continue to pay property tax for homes that have burned. She said she’s reached out to Sonoma County, which did significant outreach to property owners impacted by the Kincaid and Tubbs fires, to find out how they handled the matter.
She said the county needs to make sure it's not adding to the suffering of fire survivors by taxing them as if their property hadn’t been destroyed.
Ford responded that fire/calamity reduction of valuation is based on Section 170 of the Revenue and Taxation Code, which calls for removing the valuation of damaged properties where the damage is above $10,000. The value of the land and a small valuation is required for utilities to remain.
“To the best of our knowledge all fire victims from all fires have had their valuation removed,” said Ford. He added that if there are any properties that residents feel have not had their valuation removed, he asked them to contact his office and they will apply section 170 reduction as soon as possible if it applies.
Lee said she’s been criticized for accepting endorsements. “In my mind endorsements do not mean quid pro quo.”
She said she also wants to institute electronic recording, as is used in other counties.
Ford said that process is well underway but that the company that handles county property tax systems announced that it’s leaving California. His office is now working on a new sealed bid process to select a new vendor. Electronic recording is processed through a module of the recording system and the module will be purchased with the new recording system.
Goals and priorities
For Lee, most of whose management experience came from her earlier career when she worked in fast food, the very first thing she would do is meet with every employee individually to get their input on what works and what doesn’t, what needs to change and what should remain. She plans to acknowledge their concerns and set meaningful goals for them.
While she likes the idea of regular training, she said she thinks Ford’s practice of daily training may be a bit much and that it can be done less frequently. There also are opportunities she’s aware of to send staff to continuing education training with the State Board of Equalization.
She said she wants to see a memorandum of understanding reached between the treasurer-tax collector, assessor-recorder and auditor-controller so that each knows how it works with the other key finance departments.
“The people of Lake County cannot continue to have a government that is not speaking to each other,” she said, explaining departments have to put aside differences. “We need to move forward now and take care of the citizens of Lake County.”
Lee will need to get a temporary appraiser’s certificate if she’s elected, but she said it’s “not a difficult thing to do.”
She said she has a college degree and school comes easily for her, so she doesn’t anticipate any problems doing that.
Among his priorities, Ford wants to continue getting through the backlog.
His initial estimate was that it would take 10 years to work through it, and that he’s close to being on schedule. “I’m naturally a fixer.”
Ford estimated that he needs another two to three years to complete the backlog, explaining that the work likely would have been completed had it not been for the county’s fires and the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said he doesn’t want to leave the work undone, and it feels a little bit like Don Quixote.
Ford also wants to complete the succession planning he’s started, which he says is important due to the assessor-recorder being a key financial office.
Ultimately, Ford said he wants to see the community succeed.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.