Larry Stone has announced he will seek a fourth term as Santa
Clara County
’s assessor. This time, he may have a fight on his hands.
Larry Stone has announced he will seek a fourth term as Santa Clara County’s assessor. This time, he may have a fight on his hands.
Pete McHugh, who’s in his third and final term as a county supervisor, has indicated he may want to move from the board chamber to the assessor’s office in 2006.
He recently criticized Stone’s ties to development companies and homebuilders and charged the assessor with politicizing the office.
“I believe that the residents of Santa Clara County deserve a full-time assessor who is not involved in land development and one who will not use the position to raise funds for political campaigns,” McHugh said. “That is why I am exploring the possibility of running for the position of assessor.”
Stone, who has a parallel career as a developer, said he has worked on affordable housing projects only since he took office in 1994 and that he hasn’t solicited any political contributions since 2002, when he ran unopposed.
“I’m not sure what the validity of that concern is, but others have expressed it,” Stone said of McHugh’s suggestion that he has a conflict of interest. “If you carry that to the extreme, you couldn’t own stock in any company in the county or own any property. Pete McHugh would have to assess his own house.”
And Stone said he welcomed McHugh’s challenge, which would be the first serious effort to unseat him since he took office 12 years ago.
“Running unopposed is like going to school and not getting a report card. The fact that I could have a competitive race is intriguing to me,” Stone said of a campaign that he estimated could cost as much as $400,000. “I’m not discouraging Pete from running.”
McHugh said he was hoping to run for an empty seat but likes the idea of giving voters an alternative to Stone.
In his previous races, he has never raised more than about $100,000.
The assessor’s office is responsible for valuing all real and business personal property in the county, which is currently worth about $240 billion.
The assessor is not a policy maker, but a manager of the 280-person office that last year performed 1,200 audits, reviewed 25,000 building permits and processed 115,000 deeds. The position is elected so the assessor will be independent of the board of supervisors.
“It’s critical that the assessor be independent of the board of supervisors, who spend the money raised on the assessment rolls,” Stone said. “You can bet there would be more than just the subtle pressure that exists today [to increase the tax rolls]. This isn’t the highest-profile political office in the world or the sexiest one but I think I’ve made it a little higher-profile than in most other counties.”
Stone said he was contemplating retirement, but decided to run again because he wants to reform some of the office’s management procedures, particularly in regard to employee performance.
“I’m kind of embarrassed to say some of the stuff I haven’t gotten done in 12 years,” he said. “The county bureaucracy is very restrictive in terms of doing anything that involves performance management.”
Stone wants also to oversee an upgrade of the office’s computer system, and said he is proud of the great strides the county has already made in the area of technology.
“Ten years ago, I was the only one in the office who had voicemail,” he said. “It was like a car dealership around here. You had to use a loudspeaker to tell people which line to pick up.”
