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?