This year, there are a multitude of peculiarities in the race for San Bernardino County assessor, even beyond the typical degree of idiosyncratic abnormality which contests for that particular office embody.
As the largest geographical county in the lower 48 states, encompassing a land area larger than Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut and New Jersey combined but with an overall population density throughout most of its history that allowed its politicians to get into office with a number of votes that totaled less than that polled by fifth-, sixth- and seventh-place finishers in other jurisdictions, graft and corruption flourished in San Bernardino County throughout most or all of the 20th Century, intensified with the advent of the Third Millennium and continues to the present, tainting virtually every aspect of the county government, including its board of supervisors, its elected sheriff and district attorney, the county treasurer and, as acutely or more so than in other stations of governance, the county assessor’s office.
First, the position paid more money. In San Bernardino County, the assessor also serves as the county clerk and recorder, for which triple function the holder of the office was paid at that time a salary of $218,101.69, further pay of $20,384.75 and benefits of $66,506.16, for a total annual compensation of $304,992.60. Comparatively, a member of the board of supervisors was not paid as well, receiving at that time $151,690.24 in salary, $17,000.10 in pay additions and $49,825.74, for a total annual compensation of $218,516.08.
While in San Bernardino County the county treasurer doubles as the tax collector, that authority extends to doing little more than taking the money in. In San Bernardino County, the obscure position of county assessor is the county’s highest taxing authority, a position of tremendous power, leverage and influence. Not only does the assessor determine the value of real estate, which has a direct bearing on taxes to be paid by residents on their homes, his authority extends to determining the value of buildings, offices, headquarters and factories, machinery and equipment used by businesses, which impacts the taxes those entities pay. The tax burden an entrepreneur, company, venture or corporation must bear can have a dramatic – indeed a controlling or make-or-break – impact on a business, influencing whether it is able to remain as a going concern. Beyond that, the assessor has the ability to determine, in a very real way, just how successful a successful enterprise is going to be.
This has served as a magnet for graft – the provision of bribes, payoffs, kickbacks and the like – which have undercut the integrity of governance in San Bernardino County and damaged the entire region’s reputation as a whole. A business operation, for example, entailing factories and foundries which does a brisk business in which it has $20 million in sales against $5 million in personnel costs and $5 million in other overhead costs including materials and equipment acquisition and maintenance, would show a profit of $10 million, of which the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the California Franchise Tax Board would get their piece of the action. That, however, would not be the extent of the government’s intrusion upon the pocketbook of the business owner, who would yet be subject to a host of fees and further taxes, consisting of property taxes on the land on which the factories and foundries are located and assessments on the equipment contained therein. It is the county assessor’s office which makes a determination of the value of the land, buildings and equipment in question. Business owners willing to peel off $5,000 or $10,000 or $25,000 of their own and prevail upon their employees to write $500 or $1,000 or $2,000 checks to the incumbent assessor in the year of or the year prior to the assessor’s run for reelection just might find that the assessor’s office has determined that the business’s land, facilities and equipment should be assessed, depending on the circumstance, at $7 million or $17 million or maybe $27 million less than what might otherwise be determined. In virtually every case, it is the assessor’s office which is the final arbiter of such matters.
M.A. Cranmer, as San Bernardino County assessor in the 1950s, sought to carry out his function in a straightforward manner. He was succeeded by John Bevis, who had risen through the ranks in the office, in 1959. Robert Herbin, who began as a field appraiser in the assessor’s Victorville office in 1951, steadily advanced in the office, becoming assistant chief appraiser in 1959 and chief appraiser in 1968. In 1974, he ran successfully for the top spot in the office when Bevis retired. Herbin’s virtually encyclopedic knowledge of the office and dedication to a formalistic and standardized set of procedures showing no bias or favoritism resulted in what is generally considered to be the apex of the office’s function throughout the county’s 169-year history. In 1978, after a single term as assessor, Herbin was challenged by Robert Gordon “Gordie” Young, a transplanted Canadian and liquor store owner from Fontana who had been bitten by the political bug while he was working as an accountant/auditor at Kaiser Steel and Kaiser Hospital. Young served three-and-a-half years on the Fontana School Board and two terms on the Fontana City Council from 1968 to 1976. The far more politically savvy Young prevailed in the 1978 race and remained in office for four terms, from 1979 until 1995. During Young’s tenure, the assessor’s office’s burnished its reputation for showing favoritism to county politicians and those aligned with them, applying one set of assessment standards for the political elite and members of the establishment which resulted in lower tax rates for them and applying a different taxing yardstick in essence to more than 98 percent of the county’s property owners, residents and businesses.
In 1996, Chico Porras, the workhorse under Young whose professionalism had served as the major principle of integrity during the 16 years Young was in place, ran to succeed Young, and was seeming on course to do so when he captured 46,928 votes or 32.2 percent in the June primary against five other candidates. In the November runoff, however, the second-place finisher in June, Don Williamson, easily outdistanced Porras, who polled 116,309 votes or 40.1 percent to the victor’s 173,225 votes or 59.8 percent. Young was reelected in 1998 and 2002.
Bill Postmus, another politician who had first been elected to the county board of supervisors representing the First District in 2000 and was reelected to that post in 2004, the same year he was elevated to the position of chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, ran for county assessor against incumbent Williamson in 2006.
With two other challengers in the contest, which consequently resulted in no candidate getting a majority of the vote in the June primary, the race was extended into a head-to-head runoff between Postmus and Willamson that November. In what to this day remains the most expensive political campaign in San Bernardino County history, Postmus prevailed. In the course of the late spring and fall race, Postmus expended more than $2.4 million in promoting himself. At the same time, he was able to use his political reach as the chairman of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors and the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee to raise another $1.3 million worth of electioneering funds through political action committees and so-called “independent” expenditure committees that were in fact not independent, which was then used to carry out attacks on Williamson.
Despite having been outspent roughly seven-to-one, Williamson yet managed to poll 47 percent of the ballots cast to Postmus’s 52.62 percent, with 0.38 percent going to write-in candidates.
Once Postmus was settled in as assessor, he immediately moved to exploit the power and influence of the office, creating a second assistant assessor’s position where previously there had been only one and hiring 11 of his associates, none of whom had any expertise or previous experience in real estate, appraising or levying taxes, into the office’s 13 highest-paying positions. From those 11 positions, those Postmus hired engaged themselves not in work relating to the assessor’s office’s function but in political and electioneering activity on behalf of the Republican Party, political issues and candidates for local and statewide office favored by Postmus. Moreover, Postmus used his discretionary power to set taxing rates on the county’s residents and business operations to lower the assessments of those demonstrating a willingness to pony up money to support him in his planned future political endeavors by endowing his campaign fund and/or the political action committees he controlled with donations or otherwise supporting candidates and political issues he favored. Those who contributed to his electioneering fund or that of his allies Brad Mitzelfelt, Paul Biane, Tad Honeycutt and Anthony Adams were given a break on the taxes they paid. Those who did not paid the going rate. In Postmus, the pay-to-play ethos that pervaded San Bernardino County to greater and lesser degrees for decades had never been so grossly and clearly illustrated.
In 2009, after the degree to which Postmus and those he had put into place in the assessor’s office were utilizing public facilities, assets and the assessor’s office’s authority for partisan political purposes became widespread public knowledge, Postmus imploded in scandal and was forced to resign as assessor and charged with six felony counts of misuse of his elected office. He was convicted on all six of those counts, along with eight other felony political corruption charges, in 2011. Four of the political operatives inexperienced in assessor’s office operations Postmus had hired into lucrative posts within the assessor’s office were indicted or criminally charged; ultimately three of those were convicted.
Postmus was replaced with Dennis Draeger, who took the office into a holding pattern. Draeger did not engage in anything approaching the over politicization of the assessor’s office that Postmus had, but did little to erase the favorable assessments that had been conferred upon the class of landowners, property owners and business owners who were able to afford making exorbitant donations to the county’s political elite.
Draeger, who was not a politician, per se, but rather a journeyman county employee who had worked in both the assessor’s office and treasurer’s office, took on the role of a politician when he ran for assessor in 2010. Though Draeger did not tap into the largesse of the legion’s of political donors who had consolidated behind Postmus to put him into the assessor’s post, he obtained enough support overall to trounce his very poorly funded opponent, Al Palazzo 73.4 to 26.6 percent, in the election.
In 2014, Draeger opted to retire. Dan Harp, who as the chief appraiser under Williamson was the one of just two assessor’s office in place under Postmus who had managed to keep the office functioning when Postmus and his political cronies were exploiting it for partisan purposes and had risen to the position of assistant assessor under Draeger, vied to replace him. Opposing Harp, who had never run for office, was an established politician, Bob Dutton. Dutton, the son of wealthy developer/entrepreneur Ted Dutton, had followed his father’s lead relatively early on, making a name for himself as a shopping center developer partnering with his father and running related businesses in the City of Rancho Cucamonga during that municipality’s formative years. From his position as the president of the Rancho Cucamonga Chamber of Commerce, Dutton had successfully run for the Rancho Cucamonga City Council. From that vantage, sponsored by his father’s considerable wealth, he successfully ran for the California Senate. Following two terms in the upper legislative house in Sacramento, he sought to make the transition to Congress in 2012, vying in the newly formed 31st Congressional District, which was drawn up following the redistricting based on the 2010 Census. Despite his father’s money and his own fundraising ability based upon his two terms in the California Legislature, Dutton was thwarted in his ambition to hold federal office by Gary Miller, a fellow Republican and 14-year Congressional incumbent in California’s 42nd Congressional District, who chose to run for reelection in the 31st District as well.
Two years after losing to Miller, Dutton sought a political comeback by running for the assessor’s post. Dutton had nothing approaching Harp’s degree of expertise and experience with regard to the function fo the assessor’s office. He thus had to bring his superior fundraising capability based upon his years in office and his previous successful electoral campaigns and single electoral defeat to bear in the contest against Harp, in which he prevailed by a very thin margin, with 73,549 or 50.61 percent of the total 145,332 votes cast to Harp’s 71,783 votes or 49.39 percent.
With the office again in the hands of a politician, the favoritism shown toward those willing to pay for influence by means of political donations was back in vogue.
Four years later, with Dutton having locked up virtually all donations that could possibly go to anyone considering running for assessor, he was unopposed in his reelection bid.
Thereafter followed what is now widely recognized as an act of extreme disrespect by Dutton toward the voters and taxpayers of San Bernardino County, no matter how poignant and sad of a personal challenge he found himself in.
It is now known that Dutton had developed prostate cancer by 2019. It had progressed undetected for at least a year. In 2021 it had reached a critical stage. The Sentinel is reliably informed that on three separate occasions in the fall and early winter of 2021, paramedics had been summoned to Dutton’s palatial residence in Rancho Cucamonga when he suffered a medical emergency related to his condition.
Before the end of 2021, Dutton learned that his cancer had metastasized and had reached his bones.
Nevertheless, with the filing period for the 2022 election approaching, he chose to seek reelection as assessor/county clerk/recorder, the total annual remuneration for which had grown by that point to $409,540.07. It was widely known that former San Bernardino County Fifth District Supervisor Josie Gonzales was contemplating running for assessor and had retained a substantial amount of the money she had in her political war chest when she was supervisor, which she had transferred into her political fund for election to the assessor’s position.
As had been the case four years previously, Dutton’s status as an entrenched incumbent with substantial name recognition and virtually unlimited fundraising capability discouraged anyone who might have contemplated running against him. This extended to Gonzales, who had at her disposal more than $200,000 that could be used to finance her run for assessor. Though a handful of people close to him knew of his medical condition, Dutton had succeeded in keeping word of it within a very tight circle and from the public at large.
The filing period for county positions to be contested in 2022, including the assessor’s post, opened on February 14, 2022. Had Gonzales known that Dutton was ailing, she assuredly would have entered the race. But, Dutton, knowing his prospect of living long enough to serve out the next term as assessor, running from January 2023 until January 2025 was nil, kept everything under wraps. When the filing period for elected county government offices closed on March 11, 2022, Dutton was the sole candidate in the race.
Though circumstances had given him a glimpse of how incapacitated he was becoming, Dutton chose to seek reelection, knowing he would not be able to serve out his full term, resulting either in the expense of having to hold a special election to ensure that the county’s residents are represented by an elected assessor/county clerk and recorder or giving to the board of supervisors control over who would fill the position. Advantaged with the power of incumbency and a substantial campaign fund, Dutton chose to stay in office, knowing that there was virtually no prospect he could be successfully challenged. In the 1980s, the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Dutton was heard decrying “career politicians” who were damaging the nation, the State of California and local government by holding onto office at any price to benefit themselves with no regard for serving their constituents and their needs. By 2022, at which point he had spent 20 of the previous 22 years in elected office, Dutton had himself become a career politician, one so intent on staying in office that he ran for reelection knowing he was dying and would be unable to fulfill the duties of the position and term which he had convinced the voters to entrust to him.
The June 7, 2022 primary in which the unopposed Dutton was reelected assessor until January 2027 took place. A mere month and 16 days later, on July 13, 2022, more than five months before his current term was to elapse and before he was to begin serving the term to which he had been elected, Dutton died.
At that point, the board of supervisors, had it acted with alacrity, could have solicited candidates for assessor, subjected them to an application process and put those meeting the qualifications for candidacy on the November 8, 2022 general election ballot by the August 12, 2022 deadline set by the county registrar of voters to include candidates on that year’s general election ballot and voter pamphlet, giving the county’s voters an opportunity to elect their assessor for the term running from January 2023 to January 2027. Instead, the board of supervisors tarried, and did not get around to recruiting those interested in serving in the position until later in August 2022. At that point, four candidates came forward: Dutton’s widow, Andrea Dutton; former San Bernardino County Supervisor and former San Bernardino County Treasurer/Tax Collector/Auditor/Controller/Recorder/County Clerk Larry Walker; former San Bernardino County Supervisor/former Fontana Councilwoman Josie Gonzales; Bradley Snowball, a supervising auditor-appraiser in the assessor’s office; and Chris Wilhite, who was serving in the capacity of assistant assessor, Dutton’s second-in-command, at the time of his death.
Ultimately, the board of supervisors chose Wilhite to succeed Dutton, and scheduled a special election to fill the assessor’s post from January 2025 until January 2027.
Running for the position are Gonzales, who is making a political comeback attempt after having been termed out of office as Fifth District County Supervisor in 2020; Williamson, who is seeking to make a political comeback 18 years after Postmus knocked him out of the assessor’s position in 2006; Victorville Councilwoman Blanca Gomez; and Dara Smith, who is currently a director of assessor operations with the County of Los Angeles.
The 2024 San Bernardino County Assessor’s race is beset with a plethora of peculiarities.
The contest for assessor is normally held in the even-numbered election year corresponding with California’s gubernatorial election. This election is being held in a presidential election year. The contest for assessor normally involves the victor being elected to a four-year-term. The winner of the election in November will serve a two-year term. Normally, the race for assessor, as is the case with all elections in San Bernardino County, including those for supervisor, district attorney, sheriff, treasurer and superintendent of county schools, consists of a contest corresponding with the primary election, in which a winner is declared immediately upon the vote tallying if a candidate receives a majority of the vote and a runoff is held between the two top vote-getters in November if in a contest involving more than two candidates none polls a majority of the vote. In this year’s assessor’s race, no voting took place during the March primary. Instead, a single contest for the position is being held in November. The winner will be the top vote-getter, even if he or she does not receive more than 50 percent of the vote.
The peculiarities extend to the contestants in this year’s race.
Gonzales is a former member of the board or supervisors. Though members of the board of supervisors vying for another county political office is not unheard of – as was the case with Bill Postmus running for assessor in 2006 and Larry Walker running for auditor/controller-county clerk/recorder in 1998 and again in 2002 and 2006 and the merged office of auditor controller-treasurer/tax collector in 2010 and 2014 – it is a rare enough occurrence to be remarkable.
Williamson is staging an attempted political comeback two years shy of two decades after he left office. From a historical standpoint, this is noteworthy. Such attempts are rare, as generally, once an officeholder leaves office, he or she in only the rarest of circumstances returns to that office. Dennis Hansberger, who was one of the youngest supervisors in county history, was first elected Third District supervisor in 1972 and served two terms, leaving in 1980. In 1996, he vied once more for Third District supervisor, successfully and was reelected twice thereafter. The sixteen year gap between his two stints on the board of supervisors is two years less than the 18 years between the time Williamson last served as assessor and the time he will return to that post in January, if, of course, he is victorious on November 5.
Blanca Gomez, an incumbent Victorville councilwoman elected at-large most recently in 2020, is vying for reelection to the council in the November election, this time in District 3, now that the city has chaged to by-district elections. Thus, Gomez is seeking two elected positions in the same election, an extremely rare circumstance.
Smith, a political neophyte, is seeking the assessor’s post based upon her professional experience as an assessor’s office employee. Her position as one of four director of assessor operations with the County of Los Angeles under Assessor Jeff Prang makes her the fifth highest-ranking employee below Prang in that office. Historically in San Bernardino County, assessors have consisted variously of politicians with little prior experience with regard to the assessor’s office function being elected to the post or what have been nonpoliticians who came up through the ranks of the San Bernardino County Assessor’s Office and were appointed or elected at least partially on the basis of their professional accomplishments and competence with respect to the function of the assessor’s office. Smith falls into neither category. Until entering the current contest, she was not a politician. Though she has accrued substantial experience with regard to the function of the assessor’s office, she did not achieve that experience in San Bernardino County but rather in Los Angeles County. Her status as a San Bernardino County resident qualifies her to run for assessor.
An anticipated issue in the race is that of professional experience. In this regard, Williamson and Smith best Gonzales and Gomez.
Another anticipated issue in the race is that of political experience. In this regard, Gonzales, Gomez and Williamson best Smith, although to some voters at least, a candidate’s status as an established politician is not seen as a desirable trait.
Another anticipated issue in the campaign is familiarity with and previous integration into San Bernardino County. Gonzales, Gomez and Williamson have claim to being, or having been, San Bernardino County establishment insiders, to one degree or another. Smith stands as an outsider. Nevertheless, Smith’s aloofness from the pay-to-play ethos that has dominated San Bernardino County politics for decades and the degree to which Gonzales, Gomez and Williamson were or are immersed in it, could, if played properly, redound to Smith’s benefit.