"He made no factual corrections," Perez said

On Monday, the OC Reg (here) described John Williams’ response to a “scathing” Grand Jury report about his agency (Trustee Williams is also OC Public Guardian/Administrator). According to the GJ, Johnny Boy is mighty incompetent. Plus he's blowing off the GJ's recommendations.

Today, a reader alerted us that the Reg article has been updated:

UPDATED 7/7/09: James Perez, foreman of the grand jury that published the two reports, said Tuesday that Williams was allowed to review both reports before they were published and that he did not raise concerns about their accuracy.

"He made no factual corrections," Perez said. "What he said was, the facts are correct, but I dispute your interpretation of the facts."

Williams rejects the claims, as well as most of the grand jury's recommendations, in his official response. For example, the grand jury reported that Williams' office took four years to resolve the estate of a man who had died. The estate was worth $7,100 at the time of death, the report said, but it had dwindled to zero before it ever reached the court to be dispersed.

"The public administrator office didn't even handle this case," Williams wrote in his response. He also defended his staffing levels, saying they're in line with other county agencies and that the grand jury comparisons are misleading. He denied pension spiking and said his office has saved the county money.

Williams still has two months to respond to the grand jury's second report, but he doesn't believe voters will support splitting his office or change it from being an elected job.

"It makes as much sense as dividing up sheriff and coroner," Williams said. "It would be too cost prohibitive."

My money's on Perez.

Big man

As Rebel Girl noted, this morning, Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur spammed the district community, alerting us to two recent newspaper articles about declining property tax collections (County's property tax values tumble $5.2billion [OC Reg] and First property tax dip since 1994 [LA Times]).

Sounds alarming.

"I encourage you,” he wrote, “to read [these] two very important newspaper articles … regarding the decreasing property taxes in Orange County. This will have an adverse impact on our District budget, especially in the area of basic aid dollars.”

Naturally, the Chancellor’s links to the articles didn’t work. The link to the Reg article opened up my mail program. The link to the Times article opened to a page that did not include the article.

Whatever. I, too, noticed these articles. Our district is an unusual “basic aid” district, which means that we get lots of our funding from a portion of locally collected property taxes. So when property values decline, our funding declines. On the other hand, compared to other districts, we’re swimming in dough, a fact that has inspired resentment across the state. We’ve got shitloads of extra money, and so the issue has been: how do we spend it? New facilities? A bust of St. Ronald?

As you know, here in Dissent, we’ve often noted our dependence on local property taxes, and we’ve monitored board discussions of the situation. We've been on top of it, baby.

So why didn’t I provide a link to yesterday’s articles?

It was because of lines like this one: “Orange County's total property tax values for 2009-10 are down 1.23%....” (LA Times).

One percent. Wow.

You know me: I have no clue about fiscal issues. But I do have a question: do we get a portion of the whole county’s property tax collections (which took a 1% hit) or do we get a portion of the property tax collections specifically for the cities that we serve (i.e., South County cities)?

I ask because some cities—e.g., Laguna Beach and Irvine—actually experienced an increase: they “have slightly increased their assessed values, mainly because of development,” reported the Times.

So exactly where do we stand?

Raghu likes to play the big man. We should just buy him a crown and then ask him to hide somewhere, incommunicado.

That would be best for all concerned, I think.