News

Downtown's Fairy Godmother

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A handful of tax attorneys and appraisal firms do a large percentage of the Prop. 8 work for the owners of the office monoliths. The story of the courtyard for the Citicorp Building at 1 Sansome St. is an example of the magic they can work.

The granite-pillared courtyard at 1 Sansome opens onto Market Street, providing a luxurious open space in congested downtown. In 1994, the courtyard carried an official assessed value of $27 million. In 1995, the courtyard's value was reduced to $7 million, thanks to the efforts of politically savvy Bill Bennett of the law firm Bennett & Yee and appraiser Charles Brinkerhoff of the Arthur Consulting Group.

The office tower attached to the courtyard was reduced by $23 million from its 1994 value, and it has remained at that low assessment.

Citicorp saved $731,000 in real estate taxes last year on the courtyard and tower at 1 Sansome St. through these reductions.

The list of Prop. 8 properties that escape the merciless attentions of the tax collector -- due to the merciful inattention of the assessor -- is long.

Over a five-year period, San Francisco lost $1.4 million because of value reductions at 3 Embarcadero Center, owned by Prudential Insurance and the Rockefeller family. Kentucky Central Life Insurance is getting a $220,000 Prop. 8 tax break every year on its 135 Main St. building.

Walter and Doug Shorenstein are the winners of the overall Prop. 8 sweepstakes, though. Among many other examples of tax breaks, the Shorensteins get a $62,000-a-year tax subsidy on their retail (The Sharper Image) and residential (Golden Gateway North) complex at 75 Broadway; a $255,000 annual tax reduction on Harrison Plaza, a commercial complex on the Embarcadero, near the Bay Bridge; and of course the $4.3 million yearly tax savings that the Shorensteins and BankAmerica get on the Bank of America building.

But the Prop. 8 gravy train is not limited to corporate behemoths or monster office buildings.

In 1994, Mayor Willie L. Brown's condominium at 1200 Gough St. received a Prop. 8 reduction from a $336,000 assessed value to $280,000. Rather than revert to market value after one year, the value of Brown's condo has remained frozen. This continuing reduction is saving the mayor $666 in taxes this year.

And Robert Pritikin's Chenery Street mansion -- which hosted Doris Ward's campaign kickoff party -- benefited from $284,000 in Prop. 8 value reductions over the last year.

In 1995, the San Francisco Chronicle published an investigative series about Ward's stewardship as assessor. Reporters David Deitz and John King secretly shadowed Doris Ward for several days. They reported that she seldom visited her office: She used her city car to shop at Saks, instead of going to work. Three years later, Ward's working habits appear to have changed little. According to a half-dozen of her co-workers, all of whom requested anonymity, she is absent from the office for significant amounts of time.

Prompted by public response to the Chronicle series, the State of California conducted a special audit of Ward's department. That 1995 audit is absolutely damning. It contends Ward's office could not even maintain a basic filing system. The auditors, sent by the State Board of Equalization, came up with a laundry list of dozens of essential operational improvements needed at the Assessor's Office.

The auditors turned pale at the discovery that the assessor's 1960s-vintage mainframe computer could be accessed at will. They called it "ridiculously simple" for nearly anyone in the office to raise or lower property values in the computer without authorization. The auditors urged the assessor to bring her database into the modern age, warning that the "potential for wrongdoing" in Ward's department was omnipresent.

In the 1995 report, the Board of Equalization found that record-keeping in Ward's office was a near-total disaster, resulting in "inaccurate and improper assessments." Ward's method of collecting and storing vital and irreplaceable data left the auditors aghast.

"A lost or misplaced file, which would be treated with alarm at most assessor's offices, is not unusual in San Francisco," the board wrote.

The board observed that huge value reductions on downtown office buildings were not supported by paper trails. The board said that the reasons for changes in assessed values were not being appropriately documented and filed. The report worried that personnel in the Assessor's Office may, therefore, be able to reduce property values "in situations where this is not permitted by law."

The state board went on to complain that the assessor was not reassessing the value of some multimillion-dollar commercial properties when they changed hands, as is required by law. And among other things, the board reported, the assessor did not even look at 500 construction permits issued by the Port of San Francisco since 1990 -- permits that authorized the building of tens of millions of dollars in improvements that should have been placed on the city's tax rolls.

Three years later, few of the auditors' recommendations for improvements in the Assessor's Office appear to have been followed. Undervalued commercial property has not been increased in value. The basic filing system remains a disaster. The state auditors' urgent recommendation that Ward buy a new computer system has been hopelessly bungled (see related story, Page 15).

A 1997 audit of the assessor by KPMG Peat Marwick supports the notion that Doris Ward has made no real headway in fixing her problems. Of particular concern to all the accountants has been the absence of records showing how property values are assessed. Without such a paper trail, decisions made by Ward to lower property values cannot be monitored.

Who gains from the state-certified incompetence, the convenient confusion, the utter bumbling that has been shown, again and again, to permeate Doris Ward's shop?

Grant Flint, the recently retired chief appraiser of Alameda County, put it this way, in a letter he sent to the Assessment Appeals Board last fall: "Tax agents and attorneys mock the San Francisco assessor's office. Entire careers have been built off the assessor's office's weaknesses. Appraisal agents and attorneys feed off of it."

Influential commercial property owners don't seem to do so badly, either.

Last year alone, Doris Ward's policies cost San Francisco city government a sum of money that could have renovated City Hall, or launched a satellite into outer space. The $100 million lost to apparently improper Prop. 8 tax breaks could pay a year's rent in a nice condo for every homeless person in San Francisco; end child hunger in California; fund the government's portion of a football stadium in Bayview-Hunters Point; build a hospital wing; or take every single person in San Francisco out to a $133 dinner.

Of course, for any of those things to happen, it seems fairly certain that a person named Doris Ward would have to be turned out of the Assessor's Office. And who would want to do that? She's so darn nice.

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