COUNTYWIDE : County Sets Tax Processing Record

About a dozen workers in the Ventura County tax collector’s office worked a 10-hour shift at the Government Center over the weekend sorting through checks on the way to eventually tallying more than $200 million in property tax payments.

The all-time county processing record for a single day was set last Thursday, when $61 million in taxes were processed and shipped off to the bank. “It was a nice day,” said assistant tax collector John McKinney.

On Saturday, Nancy Golob, a full-time employee of the tax collector’s office for the past 18 months, sat in a cubicle and sorted through envelope after envelope, tossing the empties on the floor around her.

“I take everything out of the envelope, make sure that the check matches the stub exactly and then I put them in a pile,” she said, munching on a cookie after processing about 8,000 envelopes in eight hours.

The rush to get the money to the bank stems from the county’s desire to collect interest on tax proceeds as soon as possible, said county tax collector Hal Pittman. Each $1 million in deposits earns several hundred dollars per day in interest, so workers try to get all taxes processed and in the bank within 24 hours of their arrival.

Some of the payments are made in unconventional ways. Some checks are mailed in envelopes covered with 1-cent stamps, or come with personal messages to Pittman about assessed valuation.

The flood of checks sent in by the Dec. 10 deadline represents the first of two installments of property taxes that cover the period from July 1, 1992, through June 30, 1993, Pittman said. About 60% of the taxpayers pay for the full year in that first installment, making it the busier of the two counting sessions.

Budget cuts have pared the office’s counting staff in half this year, but the work is proceeding at almost the same rate as last year because of the addition of two new computers, nicknamed Thelma and Louise. The computers, which cost a combined $263,000, can endorse and make microfilm copies of each check, as well as develop a tally that is loaded into the county database daily.

“There’s a sigh of relief when it’s over,” Pittman said of the rush, standing amid a handful of frenetic employees and whining machines. “Then you start thinking about the next one.”