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LA WATCHDOG - The Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office is in the process of being slammed with a massive number of requests from residents and businesses to reassess their properties that have been adversely impacted by wildfires. In the Palisades alone, over 5,000 homes and numerous apartment buildings and commercial establishments were destroyed. The damage in the Palisades alone is estimated to be in the range of $25 to $30 billion.
While Assessor Jeffrey Prang was not expecting a catastrophe of this magnitude, the recent activation in August of a new cloud-based technology platform will facilitate the data processing of the reassessments. This new system replaced an antiquated 40-year-old, paper based legacy system that would have been buried by the avalanche of reassessment requests.
This successful transition contrasts with the failure of other government entities to modernize their systems. Just think of the botched rollouts of DWP’s Customer Information System, LAUSD’s payroll system, the City’s Human Resources and Payroll System, and the State’s FI$Cal accounting and financial management system.
The development of this new system took eight years and cost over $100 million. It involved accounting for 2.4 million properties that have a current assessed value of over $2.1 trillion, of which about 800,000 properties with an assessed value of $850 billion is within the City of Los Angeles. It also involved digitizing all the County’s property records, not an insignificant task.
The proper functioning of the Assessor’s Office is important to the City because property taxes comprise over 35% of General Fund revenues. But for the upcoming year, the projected growth in property tax revenues will be lowered by around $50 to $75 million from the lower assessments of Palisades real estate, adding to the City’s existing budget woes.
Since his election in 2014, Prang has kept a low profile, certainly not like our elected officials that occupy City Hall and the County Hall of Administration. Rather, this unexciting department is part of the County’s basic infrastructure and its daily grind. And since Prang took office, the Office is not surrounded by reports of corruption and inefficiency. But this has not made the news because no news is good news for the Assessor’s Office.
Are Prang and his team in the Assessor’s Office up to the task of processing thousands of reassessments? More than likely yes and we look forward to not reading about the Assessor’s Office in the paper as it goes about its daily business.
(Jack Humphreville writes LA Watchdog for CityWatch. He is the President of the DWP Advocacy Committee, the Budget and DWP representative for the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council, and a Neighborhood Council Budget Advocate. He can be reached at: [email protected].)
