Andrew Crockett is the Assessor Santa Clara County Needs

Silicon Valley needs open access to assessment data and updates to appraisal methods and technology. That means Larry Stone needs to go.

Santa Clara County is one of the most valuable places in the country, with an estimated property value of more than $600 billion, and is home to some of the largest companies in the entire world- including Apple, the world’s most valuable company by market cap, as well as Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Thanks to the success of tech companies which have flourished in the area since the invention of the computer and the popularization of the internet, Silicon Valley has become well-known for its sky-high real estate prices, driven by high salaries and fierce competition for space in the tech haven. It is one of the very few places in the world where a 1000 square foot home built in 1949 can sell for $1.5 million dollars.

The outsized economic impact of the real estate market in Santa Clara county makes the mostly obscure position of County Assessor one of vital importance. County Assessors in California are elected, and are responsible for running the Assessor’s Office, providing accurate and timely valuations for all property in the county, and entering assessment data into the records of the state in order to both facilitate the collection of property taxes for local governments and school districts and to provide the state and the public with information for making policy decisions, particularly those that may affect or be affected by the real estate market. Accordingly, the upcoming election for the Assessor’s Office can have a serious impact on the economy of Silicon Valley and the state generally.

The election taking place this June pits the 7-time incumbent Larry Stone against Andrew Crockett, a Certified Public Accountant who previously worked in the Assessor’s Office under Stone. Here at Progress & Poverty, we believe that modern assessment practices and open public data are vital for the well-being of all citizens. Accordingly, we support Andrew Crockett for Santa Clara County Assessor and recommend that interested parties contribute to his campaign. This is an election that transcends local concerns: the open availability of real estate data from Silicon Valley will contribute to research and economic studies across the world as people seek to develop more accurate market models and create strategies to promote affordable housing and sustainable development.

Santa Clara County was made what it is today by the quick adoption of technological innovation and creative modernization. However, that enthusiastic embrace of technology has not carried over to the county’s methods of property assessment. Despite the fact that the intersection of land and technology forms such a central part of the Silicon Valley economy, its assessment tools are outdated. Some of the programs used by the assessors office to evaluate the assessable properties owned by Apple and Google still run on COBOL, a programming language developed all the way back in the 1950s and entirely unused in modern Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal.

Most importantly, the county’s assessment data is actively being concealed from the public, locked behind exorbitant paywalls of questionable intent. Our contributor Lars Doucet, who is currently working on a Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal model using public assessment data from numerous cities across the United States, explains that the cost of accessing data in Santa Clara is prohibitive on a level otherwise unknown to local government databases, most of which are free:

“[Almost] every city provides assessed values and property characteristics, as they should, that's basic info in the public interest. Most provide it for free. Most let you download it directly. But not all of them… Some of them require you to access this data through a search portal, though it's clear they have all the underlying data sitting in a database, and a call to the Assessor's Office will probably get you the full dataset. Some of them will charge a record copying fee for this. But you might have noticed one of these data points sticks out like a giant sore thumb... San Jose. Specifically Santa Clara County. The seat of Silicon Valley.

If you want to get the same data that the majority of the top 20 cities give out for free, and the rest charge a nominal fee, you will need to pay $47,000 dollars. Most cities have slick modern open data portals. Some are janky but the data is good. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has the lowest tech, least accessible, most opaque, and most expensive.” 

To put that cost in perspective, that’s $13,000 higher than the median US annual salary, and 60% of the median California salary.

It is not difficult to make public assessment data easy to access. Most municipalities use a free open-source data platform that provides high-quality data access to the public. Using a proprietary platform costs slightly more and is harder to maintain, but ultimately we cannot find any justification or positive impact for such an expensive access fee. When Lars asked what the basis for this charge was, the Assessor’s Office replied that the California state law had a provision for cost coverage.

This is in fact the case. California law clearly states: “property characteristics information maintained by the assessor is a public record and shall be open to public inspection.” It further states, “the Assessor may require that a fee reasonably related to the actual cost of developing and providing the information be paid by the party receiving the information.”

This is perfectly reasonable, but it is unclear how Stone’s exorbitant and nationally unprecedented fee among any other major US city is in any way “reasonably related to the actual cost of developing and providing the information.” The operative words here being “actual cost.” 

For one, by the office’s own admission all of their data fits on a single CD file. For two, the municipality of San Francisco –presumably subject to the same state law– provides both assessor’s rolls and historical real estate transaction records through a modern web portal, free of charge. For three, given that Stone’s base salary is $219,726.69 (not including benefits), charging this much for the data presents a cost equivalent to 78 days of the Assessor’s full-time work salary, which seems completely implausible as a basis for cost recovery. Given that literally no other major municipality in the United States comes even close to the amount Stone’s office charges, we are skeptical that it could possibly cost this much to provide less than 500 MB of data to the public in the year 2022.

On the other hand, if it truly does cost this much for the Assessor’s Office to provide the data, that would only testify to how obsolete Stone has allowed his office’s computer systems to get.

Withholding assessment data behind high paywalls directly privileges wealthy real estate investors and corporations, who are easily able to pay the fee to access immensely valuable market data - and it does so at the expense of citizens attempting to understand the market, journalists who can evaluate the effectiveness of the assessment office and prevent or expose corruption, and researchers attempting to create strategies to improve access to housing, help vulnerable minorities, and sustainably grow the economy.

Professor C. J. Gabbe, associate professor of urban planning at Santa Clara University, said, “Santa Clara County has the most expensive assessor data that I have encountered. It has only been accessible to me for specific research purposes with a letter from a public agency funder. SCC's approach inhibits important research in the public interest, including that to address the housing affordability crisis. The SCC assessor should reconsider its approach and adopt the open source ethos of many other successful counties.”

Andrew Crockett is a qualified Assessor, and has made his main platform the modernization of the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office and its transformation into an open public service with freely available data. This much-needed reform will turn the Assessor’s Office into a tool for the betterment of the commons, rather than simply selling valuable public data to companies like Blackrock at the expense of its citizens.

His opponent, Larry Stone - an 81-year old - has served as the Assessor for 27 years, and if elected will occupy the Santa Clara County Assessor’s office for 32 years running. Before being elected as Assessor he was President of the Regency West Real Estate Fund, and in 1990 he founded Larry Stone Partners LLC, a real estate investment services company where he currently serves as CEO and president. As an Assessor he has been strongly supported by real estate interest groups, receiving donations from those such as real estate billionaire John Sobrato. 

While this potential conflict of interest is reasonable enough for concern, an Assessor’s life is intimately bound up in real estate and it is not surprising that he should have a high level of contact with the real estate industry. However, other events raise further questions. His opposition to last year's reform of Proposition 13 indicates a willingness to put the interests of investors over the interests of the public. There is also the matter of his involvement with the building of the San Francisco 49ers new stadium. During the team’s relocation process, Larry Stone received hundreds of dollars worth of free tickets and served as chairman for the San Francisco 49ers Stadium Advisory Council for 4 years, campaigning heavily for the building of the new Levi’s Stadium. Once the stadium was built, the 49ers appealed the property tax assessment and took Stone to court, where the county unexpectedly lost and was forced to halve the assessment and repay the team $36 million in tax refunds- a tax bill which will cost the county hundreds of millions of dollars in the future.

While the actions of Larry Stone fall short of criminal activity, they beg the question: who is Mr. Stone and the Santa Clara County Assessor’s office serving? Progress & Poverty can find no legitimate reason why the county property records are kept behind such an enormous paywall. When we reached out to the Assessor’s Office and asked for an explanation of why the county’s data access fee is so disproportionately high compared to other cities within California, they declined to comment. The lack of transparency serves only to raise a myriad of ethical questions, while achieving nothing of apparent value. Transparent and accurate property appraisal is critical for the implementation of a land value tax and the success of Georgist policies, so we here at Progress & Poverty stand on the side of those who forward that cause and endorse Andrew Crockett for Santa Clara County Assessor. Silicon Valley is the hub of technology and progress within California, and it deserves to have an assessment process to match.

[Note from the editor: Progress & Poverty is not officially affiliated with the Crockett campaign. We support his candidacy because of his advocacy for open assessment data and accurate and modern appraisal methods, which are in line with our Georgist principles. While we had not expected to be writing on electoral politics so soon, we are happy to lend our support to those working to provide the basis for a more just and efficient system of public policy in accordance with the principles of the Georgist movement.]