on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Suddenly Sexy Assessor!

You’d expect eye-glaze to meet this race. But donations flow and interest grows as three candidates vie for the job.

(April 22, 2010)  As soon as those financial disclosure forms came in last month, in which candidates revealed how much money they’d raked in so far from supporters, our suspicions were confirmed: The Assessor’s race was hands down the most scintillating race in town.

OK, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. But at least one of the candidates’ forms made our hearts go thumpety thump with the promise of weeks to come of heady speculation, of genuine political spark, in what should be a sleepy race with a predictable outcome. (The historical record shows that if there’s an incumbent, the incumbent wins; otherwise, the job is the assistant assessor’s for the taking, with blessings from a usually bored electorate.)

Mari Wilson. Photo by Heidi Walters.

GALLERY >

There was nothing too exciting about candidate Mari Wilson’s disclosure form: Wilson, of Eureka, who has worked in the assessor’s office for 23 years and has been the assistant assessor for the past seven, had raised $6,315, most of it her own money. Jon Brooks of Blue Lake, a long-time business owner and a real estate appraiser, had raised a pinch more — $6,595 (including two-thou from the Blue Lake Rancheria). But Johanna Rodoni, a long-time Fortuna rancher, who served over half a year as a county supervisor after her husband, the rascally and charismatic supervisor Roger Rodoni, died in office, had hauled cash: $21,473 from 78 donors, mostly in $500 or smaller increments. Her donor base had a decided flavor. There were lots of Southern Humboldtians, of course. Lots of retirees. And many, many prominent members of the local ranching, development and timber communities, names like Kramer, Russ, Schmidbauer, Zanzi, Wendt, Satterlee and Barnum.

What was up? Were the land people ready to riot?

Maybe. There are some hot-button issues related to timber, ag and rural land use that are directly or indirectly associated with the Assessor’s office.

For example, there’s a plethora of illegal parcels — created by subdivisions not authorized by the planning department — for which the Assessor’s office has issued assessor parcel numbers for taxation purposes. Owners of these illegal parcels, however, can’t get permits from county planning to legally build on them, nor can they borrow against them. So there they are paying taxes, while being called illegit. The 2008-2009 Grand Jury report noted the “continuing confusion” and frustration this state of affairs has created — the 2006 Grand Jury had also tsk-tsked over it — and urged the Assessor’s office to help sort it out. The Assessor’s office, in response, agreed it should help, but made clear that it was not the Assessor’s job to determine a parcel’s legality. A memo dated June 2, 2009, written by Community Development Services Director Kirk Girard and attached to the Assessor’s response to the Grand Jury report, offered more hope: “The Planning Division and the Assessor’s office have implemented a referral system to close the gap between the Taxation Code and the Map Act. Newly issued Assessor Parcel numbers are now cross-checked against subdivision records. The Planning Division pro-actively contacts the property owner if the initial cross-check indicates there may be a problem.” Girard noted they were also pecking away at the backlog of questionable parcels, starting with ag and timber preserves “where illegal subdivisions can have the most impact on tax revenues, economic productivity and the environment.”

Then there’s the other big backlog: possibly thousands of “substandard” timber protection zone (TPZ) parcels sitting in limbo in the Assessor’s office. Humboldt County has a million acres of TPZ land, whose owners enjoy significant reduced property tax rates in exchange for keeping the land in timber production, among other requirements, although the owner in time does pay a timber yield tax — like a sales tax — as the timber is harvested.

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