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General Election 2010

Race For Clark County Assessor

Michele Shafe
Gerrit Hale

By Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Published August 4, 2010

The election for Clark County Assessor is sometimes viewed as a minor race among voters. It deals with complex administrative issues and lesser known candidates. It receives less media coverage than higher profile races. But with the current period of free-falling property values in the region, the Assessors office, which determines the taxable value of properties in Clark County, takes on an added importance this election year to homeowners.

A major theme in this year’s Assessor race is the old debate of experience and consistency vs. new management and change.
Front running candidate, Michele Shafe (D) represents the experience side of the equation. She has a long history as a public servant in Clark County and in the Assessor’s office.
Shafe began working for the County back in 1986 in the Finance Department. She recalls that one of her first projects was to work on block grants funding new fire stations in Logandale and Overton and a new community center complex in Moapa.
Shafe has worked in the Assessor’s office for 15 years; serving 13 years as the office’s Assistant Director. She emphasizes how important that experience is to the current race.

“In order to have the office run smoothly you need a leader with experience in actually running the office,” she said. “I have that experience. Some say that this is just a figurehead position without any real hands-on work. But that is not true. It is really a County Department Head position and it requires someone with experience in the office supervising and setting policy. A person coming in who didn’t have experience here would have a huge ramping up period before they could start to be effective.”
Republican challenger Gerrit Hale has less experience in the Assessor’s office but has a rich background in the private sector. Nearly 20 years ago, he started his own appraisal company. It started out small with just him working in the basement of his home and eventually built into a major operation with seven figure revenues and a national client base, Hale said. But when the financial markets collapsed in 2008, his national client base dried up and disappeared leaving him with very little business.
Hale said that he came to Nevada two years ago from Southern California to get in on the start-up of a solar energy company. But the company met with challenges early on due to regional economic conditions and became a longer term proposition than expected, Hale said.

It was then that he was offered a position in the Clark County Assessor’s Office and accepted it. He has worked there for just over a year, now.
Once Hale got into the position,  he started recognizing areas that could be improved and run more efficiently. He felt that his appraisal experience would fit well in the Assessor position. “The opportunity arose this year to run for the office,” he said. “I felt I had the education and depth of experience to do the job as it should be done. I’m the only candidate with real private sector appraisal experience. I haven’t just read it in a book, I’ve practiced it. That gives me a distinct advantage. So here I am.”
The maverick independent candidate in the Assessor race is Brent Howard. Howard feels that the office of Assessor ought to be a non-partisan position and so has done the legwork, and gathered the signatures required to enter the race as an Independent candidate. “I don’t think that the Assessor should be beholden to any political party that might push property assessments one way or another depending on the winds of politics,” Howard said.

Howard has lived in Las Vegas for most of his life. His family moved there in 1964 when he was seven years old. He attended Clark County public schools and got a degree from UNLV. He runs his own accounting business, BHI Bookkeeping in Las Vegas. “I specialize in accounting; math, business law, statistics,” he said. “I am used to analyzing problems and coming up with solutions.”

As the owner of several properties in the Vegas valley, Howard has locked horns with the Assessor’s office frequently. He said that he has had to make numerous appeals on values assigned to his properties by the Assessor, dealing with several points of dispute. “I have repeatedly asked questions dealing with how the office came to its valuation and have never received a full answer,” Howard said.

Howard stated that he has been going through the appeals process for the past two years, a process which has led him to finally file lawsuits against the State Equalization Board and the Governor’s Office.

“I think that one of the problems is that we have had the same group of people running the Assessor’s office for the past 18 years,” Howard said. “After 18 years of very little oversight, it is time to clear it out and bring in some new people with new ideas.”
One of the main issues on which Howard is running is that of transparency. He is calling for a new system in the Assessor’s office requiring full disclosure of the complete calculation of assessed values made available to the public.

To illustrate the current problem, Howard makes a comparison to a consumer visiting a grocery store. “When you check out at the register, the clerk gives you a receipt that shows every item, the amount that each thing cost, and then shows the total cost,” Howard said. “That is as it should be. But as things are, the Assessor is giving taxpayers just the total cost at the bottom. They aren’t providing the important calculations that brought about that total.”

Howard believes that taxpayers should receive a full schedule which lists all the factors leading to a property valuation. This would allow the property owner to review each of the line items and to see how the Assessor arrived at the value for his/her property. If some of the items don’t look quite right, the property owner can then dispute those specific things and come to a resolution, Howard said.

“As things are, you have a number of appraisers in the office that are operating independently and not sharing their full calculations with the public,” Howard said. “How can you expect to come to uniform and equal values that way?”
Howard believes that what he describes as a lack of transparency in the Assessor’s office is part of a larger political conspiracy in the state to keep property values artificially high in order to help balance the budget deficit.  “They do this by keeping all the calculations to themselves,” Howard said. “But that practice is not in keeping with state law. That information shouldn’t be hidden from the public.”

Gerrit Hale stops short of believing in a state-wide conspiracy. “There are some people who believe it,” he said. “But I don’t know about that. Look, my job as Assessor can be summed up simply. It would be to make sure that we do a fair appraisal of the property. The problem of the state treasury and the budget deficit would not be my problem. That would be for the legislature to handle. The Assessor shouldn’t be concerned with it.”
But Hale wonders if the methods used in Nevada for valuing property are the best way to reach a fair appraisal. He points out that Nevada is the only state that still uses a replacement cost method rather than a market value determination. That means that the taxable value is assigned based on the cost of the improvements existing on the property minus depreciation, rather than on straight and simple market valuation. “In that respect we are a little behind the rest of the country,” Hale said.
Hale recognizes that changing this would be a state legislative issue and not one for the Assessor’s office. Still he believes that many things could be done by the Assessor to move more toward a fairer market based approach, especially in the current market environment. Hale points out that, in the current down market, real estate values on property have often drifted well below the replacement cost of the improvements on those properties. But, according to state law, assessed value is not allowed to exceed market value.

“So, as things are, they (Assessor’s office) are trying to make a market determination on value using a replacement cost method,” Hale said. “In other words, the Assessor’s office tends toward closing the tax rolls based mainly on the replacement cost method and then it waits for people to appeal the value.”
Hale says this is borne out by the fact that the Assessor’s office had 8300 appeals against it in the last tax year.

“The trouble is that the only way for taxpayers in Clark County to be assured of a proper assessment is to file an appeal,” he said. “People shouldn’t have to do that. The Assessor’s office should be more pro-active than that, especially in such a dynamic market.”

Rather than just wait for the taxpayer appeals to come in, Hale suggests that the Assessor’s office should pro-actively back-test its replacement value determinations against the market to ensure an appropriate appraisal is made on each property.
But while Shafe admits to the sharp increase in appeals filed against the Assessor’s office during the last tax year, she claims that the increase was more about sharp market forces than about Assessor office methods.

“We saw property owners calling in because, while they had seen a decrease in their property values, they had an increase in their tax bill,” Shafe said. “It was understandable that they wanted an explanation.”

Shafe explained that Nevada property tax increases are capped at 3 percent per year for residential properties. “During the real estate boom a given homeowner might have seen his home value go up 40 percent, but he only saw a 3 percent tax increase during that time because of the cap,” Shafe said. “On the downside though, values might have dropped by 15-20 percent but the homeowner would still see another 3 percent increase in his tax bill. That’s because the value still hadn’t fallen below the protection of the 3 percent cap.”

Shafe said that in 2009, the Assessor’s office proactively re-valued all homes, looking closely at sales in the area and what was happening in the market.

On the subject of transparency, Shafe responded with an explanation of the Assessor’s procedure in dealing with appeals. She explained that each appealing homeowner was scheduled for a meeting where someone from the Assessor’s office went over the process for reaching the valuation.

“In each case, we showed them comparable sales in the area and other information and by the time we were finished, most people understood where the valuation came from,” Shafe said. “Sometimes the property owners brought in additional information that we didn’t know about the property. In those cases we reviewed it and, if appropriate, offered a recommendation of reduction.”

Shafe stated that of the 8,300 appeals in the prior tax year, 7,000 of them were resolved before they ever went before the Board of Equalization. “Of the 1300 that did go to the Board,” Shafe said, “our valuations were upheld in two out of three cases.”

There are some things about the Assessor’s office that Shafe feels could be improved, however. For one, she would bring more technology to the office operations to offer better customer service to the public.

She said that she would bring additional improvements to the Assessor’s website. “Currently we have a good website and a lot of people use it,” she said. “But it would be great if transactions could be done online.”

Shafe would also like to set up the Assessor’s office to be able to accept debit and credit card payments instead of cash and checks only.  This would save on the need for collections and would provide better customer service.

There is one thing that she would not change, though. “The Assessor’s office is one of the only departments at the county where, when the public calls in on the phone, they are answered by a real person instead of a computer,” Shafe said. “We have made a conscious decision to do that for our customers and we have gotten good feedback for it. That is something that I wouldn’t change.”

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