The following is a profile of one of the candidates for Santa Clara County Assessor. Longtime Assessor Larry Stone is retiring and four candidates have jumped into the race. Profiles of the other candidates are on the front page of padailypost.com.
BY DANIEL SCHRAGER
Daily Post Staff Writer
Los Altos Vice Mayor Neysa Fligor is running to replace longtime Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone, who hand-picked her as his successor.
Fligor, a lawyer, has spent the past year in the assessor’s office, first under the title of Special Assistant before being named Assistant Assessor when Stone retired in July. Fligor, 50, previously worked as the office’s legal counsel as part of her nine years with the county’s legal team.
Fligor isn’t shying away from Stone’s endorsement or her previous experience in the assessor’s office.
“We have a 92.8% positive (satisfaction) rating,” Fligor said in a phone interview with the Daily Post. “Yes, there’s room for improvement. Yes, there are different ways to do it. But it’s not broken.”
Fligor said her top priority would be to ensure the office continues to submit accurate assessment rolls by the June 30 deadline.
Her next priority would be replacing the office’s decades-old computer system, a project she leads in her current role.
“I do not waste time,” Fligor said. “So I’m already making changes and I’ve already identified other changes I want to make.” Other changes Fligor hopes to implement include placing commonly-requested files on the office’s website and improving efforts to get out into the community.
But Fligor said the office isn’t in need of drastic changes.
“The ideas I have are based on real things that are happening,” Fligor said.
Fligor has criticized her opponents — Yan Zhao, Bryan Do and Rishi Kumar — for not having experience in the office and emphasized that she’s the only candidate with a property tax appraiser certification, which assessor’s are required to get within a year of assuming the role.
Los Altos Mayor Pete Dailey has endorsed Zhao for the role, but Fligor, who’s been endorsed by the other Los Altos council members in addition to a dual-endorsement from Saratoga’s mayor, said she isn’t concerned.
“I currently have three of the Saratoga council members who serve with Yan endorsing me. I have the majority of her council supporting me,” Fligor said. “I have the majority of my council supporting me.”
Santa Clara County residents should vote for her so that “none of this revenue is put at risk by not having someone who has the experience and qualifications to lead this office starting on day one,” Fligor said.
The satisfaction ratings with Larry Stone and Fligor should be questioned. They don’t disclose HOW they arrived at 92% satisfaction. If it’s after one of Larry’s speeches, perhaps. But that isn’t the same as asking someone who is getting an unfair assessment and unnecessarily having to go through the appeals assessment process. That is a long process with huge backlog and shouldn’t even be necessary in most cases. In my case, I won 3 times but never should have needed to go to a hearing to begin with! We need fresh blood and not the incumbent.
Her bullying of fellow council member Lynette Le Eng should be an issue in this race. Will she bully Asian employees in the Assessor’s office who don’t agree with her off-the-wall ideas? Will Fligor engage in intimidation tactics to try and control her employees?
The problem I have with the assessor’s office is that they wait to open their mail, which allows them to declare more people’s taxes as being late. Everyone who pays late gets hit with a 10% penalty. When this happened to me, I asked the Post Office how many days should it take for a letter to go from a Palo Alto drop-off box to San Jose. They say three days. But the assessor’s office will declare it late even if you’ve mailed it a week early. My guess is that they’re setting the checks that arrive a day or two before the deadline and pretending they’re late so they can rake in more late fees. I called the assessor to find out how many people get hit with late fees, but they wouldn’t say. They also wouldn’t say how much money they collected this way. I’m hoping a new assessor cleans this up.
What’s the over/under on the number of Assessor employees who resign or are fired in Fligor’s first year? She’s got a real problem with Asian employees, or at least she did at the city of Los Altos and in the county government. She’s the person the powers that be picked to succeed Stone? God, another Christina Corpus (google the name if you’ve been living under a rock).