2 Get Earful for Property Appeals Foul-Up : Real estate: County supervisors question assessor and clerk about mishandling of cases and suggest revamping process.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday grilled the county assessor and clerk of the board over the mishandling of more than 200 property assessment appeals and suggested that the appeals process be completely revamped.

“This thing has to be solved,” Supervisor Roger R. Stanton told the two department officials. “Let’s be blunt. . . . There was a screw-up here somewhere. You have to sit down and iron it out.”

For the first time since the appeals controversy erupted two weeks ago, the supervisors had an opportunity to question both Assessor Bradley L. Jacobs and Phyllis A. Henderson, clerk of the board, face-to-face about the matter.

Jacobs, who is an elected official, continued to blame Henderson for allowing the appeals to exceed a two-year deadline before being scheduled for hearings. Henderson said she has never seen the files on the bungled cases and questioned whether Jacobs ever sent them to her office. By state law, residential and business property owners who appeal their tax bills must receive a hearing before a two-year deadline expires.

Amid sharp questioning from both Stanton and Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, Jacobs and Henderson acknowledged that they had no formal process of tracking the files between the two offices.

“Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’m stunned,” Vasquez said. “I think this is a serious flaw.”

Under Orange County’s unusual appeals process, taxpayers send their property appeals directly to the assessor. After reviewing the applications, the assessor transfers the challenges to the assessment appeals board office.

In addition to her job as clerk of the Board of Supervisors, Henderson also is clerk of the appeals board and responsible for maintaining the appeals files and scheduling hearings.

Jacobs said the county’s 17-year-old appeals procedure has become “informal” over the years. In response to the recent foul-ups, Henderson said she implemented a system in which the files will be logged when they are sent to her office and tracked.

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Orange County’s appeals process has also come under fire from state officials, who say that it is the only county in the state that requires residential and business owners to file appeals directly to the assessor instead of the clerk of the board.

County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider said Tuesday that he is still investigating the county’s practice and intends to make recommendations to the board within three weeks to improve the system so assessment appeals will be heard before deadlines expire.

Because 201 appeals expired before being scheduled for a hearing, the county assessor is forced to accept the owners’ estimated value of the property instead of his own. The discrepancy between the assessor’s value and the property owners’ value is about $430 million. According to county officials, the mistake may cost the county, schools and other governmental agencies as much as $10 million in lost tax revenues over the next two years.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, Jacobs defended his office, but said he wanted to get past the issue of blame and focus on preventing the appeals problem from occurring again. He said he intends to re-establish the practice informing the clerk when deadlines on appeals are approaching.

Jacobs said he stopped sending those expiration notices in July at the clerk’s request. Henderson said she made no such request.

Jacobs also told that board that 980 appeals will expire within the next three months, but said he thought all the cases could be scheduled for hearings within that time frame.

Some county officials say the problem is partly due to a tremendous backlog of appeals that were filed over the past several years, when the state’s real estate market dropped and many property owners sought to lower their taxes.

As a result of their discussion, some supervisors proposed centralizing the appeals process, possibly with Henderson, instead of dividing it between the two departments.

“I think that’s probably the way to go,” Supervisor William G. Steiner said after the meeting.