Page 68 - AAGLA-MAY 2022

Legal
forget our primary Constitutional function of closing the 2022 Assessment Roll by June 30. Without a fully executed Assessment Roll, the County’s property tax dollars we rely on could be shorted and that hurts all of us.
Needless to say, and as mentioned earlier, Proposition 19 required legislative clarification to help assessors untangle many of the ambiguities in the law. Legislation was written and introduced, Senate Bill 539, that addressed many of the deficiencies that assessors required to administer the measure, but it was only passed and signed into law by the Governor on September 30, 2021, meaning that assessors and the State Board of Equalization, which establishes statewide rules and standards for assessors, worked for months with little clarification and guidance on how to administer the measure. Moreover, there is now still another round of legislative language being considered (but not yet drafted) that could spare the property owner inadvertent property tax hikes through a property tax deferment process. Again, legislative language that my office has generated.
We’ve also undertaken enormous efforts to provide comprehensive outreach and public education, while internally developing new systems, protocols, and guidelines to streamline the Proposition 19 claims.
Additionally, we developed a dynamic landing page on our website dedicated to Proposition 19 that offers valuable resources and information, assessor.lacounty.gov/prop19. It also includes tools that will help you estimate your new property tax basis when the law requires an adjustment to your assessment.
While California’s 58 assessors and the Board of Equalization play catch-up in processing applications, I must emphasize the implementation of Proposition 19 will continue to be a significant challenge in the months ahead and will continue to create a great deal of confusion and uncertainty for both the public and administrators. However, I do anticipate that Los Angeles County will complete the backlog by late summer for property owners who were sent supplemental bills before their claims were reviewed. They will be made whole.
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Los Angeles County Assessor, Jeffrey Prang, has been in office since 2014. Upon taking office, Assessor Prang implemented sweeping reforms to ensure that the strictest ethical guidelines rooted in fairness, accuracy and integrity would be adhered to in his office, which is the largest office of its kind in the nation with 1,300 employees and provides the foundation for a property tax system that generates over $17 billion annually.