Now would be a great time to get out the word to your Berkeley neighbors and friends about the unfair tax scheme perpetrated by the Berkeley Unified School District and the City of Berkeley. It has been our goal to get the word out to EVERY cheated resident before the Ballot Measure EGH vote but we have walked over 100 miles and delivered hundreds of flyers, and have not been able to cover the whole city before the election.

If you like to exercise and enjoy the beautiful weather, there are plenty of overcharged homeowners who have not yet been reached with informational flyers. Our wonderful data analyst can give you a targeted list of homes on a street of your choice who are overcharged. (Their City building square footage is 25% of more than the county square footage has been our criteria for delivering flyers)

Thank you to our new friends at the Le Conte Neighborhood Association for inviting us to make a presentation last night and showing your support for our cause!

Please come to the Community Room at the Central Library from 1-2 pm on Sunday, 2/23 if you would like more information about how the City of Berkeley calculates your tax assessments, and what you can do to challenge errors.

We will also present at the Le Conte Neighborhood Association Meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 26 from 7:30 to 9, held at the Life Adventist Church at 2236 Parker St. in Berkeley

Today, got over 10,000 steps in distributing flyers to the Berkeley streets of Blake and Dwight. That’s a little over 5 miles of walking! The ultimate goal is to let the thousands of taxpayers know that they may be charged Property Tax Assessments for spaces in their homes that are not used for dwelling, as the voters and the tax code says they should be charged.

Would you like to help this effort? If you would like to help distribute flyers and get in your 10,000 steps for the day, please let us know by emailing equity@berkeleytaxes.info or calling 510-849-4319. We need volunteers to get the word out!

If you want to receive assistance with the calculation of your tax assessments and comparison to the dwelling space you have in your home, please come to our workshop on February 23 at the Berkeley Central Library Community Meeting Room from 1-2pm.

Are you having trouble meeting your tax burden, are in property tax arrears with the County and you are overcharged for dwelling space? Let us know. We would like to fund an effort to help you get caught up.

The web site for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors says they have Board meetings on Tuesdays at 9:30 and that members of the public may sign up for three minutes of public comment. Office staff recommended arriving and signing in at 9:30, but the closed session didn’t open until close to noon. Sitting in the open session and hearing the talks on budget and immigration services inspires awe for the pressing matters considered by these supervisors in their jobs.

For me, however, life intervenes, and prior commitments didn’t let me wait to speak past 12:30, so I left without reaching my objective of speaking before them on this important matter. Instead, we wrote letters to all 5 Supervisors on the Board, informing them why they should also take an interest in the issues we are confronting with the City of Berkeley’s dubious tax scheme. Ca Tax and Revenue Code 5099 states that requests for refund or county or city taxes may be decided on by the board of supervisors. We would like to empower the Board of Supervisors to intervene on our behalf and also to recapture ad valorem taxes on all properties which have escaped ad valorem assessments for years through the failure of the City of Berkeley to administer the tax code appropriately.

The Alameda County Assessor and the Alameda County Tax Collector appropriately and correctly do the work of assessing and levying property taxes. The City of Berkeley has no appraising or assessing qualifications and do not follow State Board of Equalization appraising protocols. Moreover, we suggest that Ca Code 51800 prohibits the City from flaunting those same laws that the County adheres to when they collect taxes.

Our letters to the members of the board included 2 photographic and evidentiary examples in the City of Berkeley each of taxed and unusable understories, untaxed and unusable understories, untaxed and usable understories, ADUs which have escaped assessments for years, houses which have been added onto and don’t pay the appropriate new assessments, including a home of 3300 ft2 which has been paying for 1850 ft2 for decades.

Though this website is mainly focused on The Problem, we had some curiosity in the 2018 City lIghts vote. That tax is a set fee per dwelling unit and not based on square footage and the ballots are mailed to the taxpayer or property owner. It is not voted on by the general public as we will do on the March Ballot for the new schools taxes.

Why were we curious? We found out that the tax was passed by a very small margin. It passed 50.26% to 49.74% and there were 241 ballots out of 9,356 declared invalid. We decided to take a look at these invalid ballots. Many were unsigned, one of them the taxpayers dog ate a portion of it (yes it was very cute!) But, many of them were very clearly marked with a NO vote, yet were placed in the invalid pile. About 50 of these in the invalid pile were placed there because taxpayers wrote notes to the city on their ballots. Examples of these notes were,

“Too many fees. No way!”

“I cannot afford higher property taxes!”

“P.S. We are still waiting for the underground utilities we paid for a decade ago.”

“I understand fee. But I’m senior. If tax went up, hard to living.”

“There is plenty of money in the general fund if it is spent wisely!”

Would those 50 ballots have made a difference if they had been included in the vote? Probably. Does the city have a right to cast aside votes that voice any dissatisfaction with the way we are taxed? We just don’t know and it is overwhelming to try to scrub out the dirtiness in all the little ways it exists.

So, the takeaway for us is this…we have to be very careful HOW we vote in this city. If we write a note to the city on our ballot voicing our dissatisfaction we risk not being counted in the vote. Let’s also be VERY careful how we vote in the next March 2020 election.

My visit to Phong La’s office today was pleasant and uneventful. A well-mannered clerk named Heidi took my stack of 32 pages for Mr. La. The contents of these pages were all the permits for 10 properties where square footage was added through the years. I collected these from the City’s Building and Planning Department last week. Some permits date as far back as 1978! These properties I selected are on the housing market. They are either listed, pending or just sold. These properties and their lucky owners have been escaping city and county assessments for years because the City of Berkeley failed to transfer the permit final with a notice of square footage added to the County as required. In fact, they have only 30 days to do so by California law. Wow, the one from 1978 is 42 years late!

So, I walked these permits over to the Assessor for the benefit of the City and the Schools today. The loss in revenues to the City of Berkeley for just these 10 properties has been about $8000 a year. The loss to the county is more difficult to calculate since I don’t have the expertise to judge the change in market value that would have been assessed by the highly qualified team in the County Assessor’s office.

Now we certainly realize that since these houses just sold, they will be reassessed based on sales price anyway in the next few months. But, my effort and exercise will hopefully shed light on the negligence the City of Berkeley has perpetrated against its citizens. A few months ago, I presented a list of these underassessed properties (there are many more that are underassessed) to the Director of the Finance Department who told me that he had other priorities than capturing this lost revenue. It would be a very straightforward procedure to capture the potential revenue going forward from these properties. He would simply add the correct values to the Finance Department’s database.

A shout out also to the school district or BSEP. You may clearly see why it is that the schools need to ask the voters to pass an additional parcel tax in March. There are several reasons, of course. Possibly the most important is that the City of Berkeley does not add square footage to the tax record when a property owner decides to do a square footage addition with a permit. They have been losing revenue for City Services and the schools in this way for years. We hope someone takes notice. We should have no doubt that the County will do their job in reassessing these properties, but how will we get the City of Berkeley do their own reassessments for City taxes and the Schools taxes. Does anyone have ideas to pursue to make it happen?

This week, started off the New Year with the goal of pursuing corrections of the tax assessments for underassessed Berkeley Properties currently on the housing market. Had wanted to start last week and I showed up on the 22nd, but the City offices were closed. The sign on 1947 Center St. said that the City was trying to save on costs. I needed the building department on the 3rd floor, so had to wait until after the new year. The 10 building records I requested could not be retrieved in a short amount of time, so had to go back later in the day to pick up flash drive with loaded microfiche records.

Some of the building records made for interesting reading. One property owner under construction had such volatile relations with the neighborhood and the city officials that the owner ended up spending some time in jail for violating a stop work order! Most records were less scintillating. It appears several of these Berkeley properties have completed construction add-ons, as I suspected, but the City has not added this building area to the tax record. Hence the property owner is saving hundreds or thousands each year on their tax bill. Compounding this systemic problem is the fact that the city often neglects to transfer proof of the permit final for construction additions to the Assessor within 30 days of inspectors sign off as required by California law. Hence, the taxed value of the property remains too low and the ad valorem taxes are also not what they should be. Stay tuned next week for updates as we attempt to do the City’s job for them: handing these records to the County Assessor for reassessment.

Stay tuned for updates on how this organization is working toward rectifying the tax equity problem in the city of Berkeley.