LAKEPORT — Lake County Treasurer-Tax Collector Barbara Ringen plans to step down amid ongoing concerns about the operations of the department she leads, but the exact date of her departure has not been determined.
Speaking in front of the board of supervisors on Tuesday, Ringen, a nearly 30-year employee and elected official for the County of Lake, said while she’d originally decided on a date to resign, that timeframe no longer appeared feasible.
“I had originally decided to retire in January (2020),” Ringen said, “but soon came to the realization that that was just not adequate time for training and moving in the right direction.”
Ringen noted the end of the current fiscal year (June 30, 2020) as a possibility, but added “that depends on training and the transition.”
In a four-to-one vote, with District 5 Supervisor Rob Brown opposed, the board moved to adopt Ringen’s intended resignation with no set date. Upon Ringen’s pending resignation, the county will need to appoint an interim treasurer-tax collector to finish out the rest of Ringen’s term, which will end in January 2023. Ringen herself was originally appointed as an interim treasurer-tax collector in 2013 after her predecessor, Sandra Shaul, stepped down.
District 2 Supervisor Bruno Sabatier, who is one member of a two-supervisor ad hoc committee formed in May to evaluate the treasurer-tax collector’s office, said the issues that have been raised about the department range from its failure to carry out tax-defaulted property auctions to a perceived lack of transparency regarding its investment practices.
In a November 2018 meeting of the board, Ringen answered from a list of more than 30 questions posed by then-chair and District 3 Supervisor Jim Steele regarding the performance of her department. The concerns raised in those questions fell largely along the same lines as those presented Tuesday by Sabatier.
Referring to that meeting, Sabatier said Tuesday that “many of the concerns were stated as being ‘worked on.’ Some of these concerns was the lack of consistent defaulted property tax auctions, checks such as TOT and property tax checks not being deposited timely, a lack of transparency when it comes to our investment practices or status, and also issues of customer service in the department coming directly to us from constituents.”
Sabatier noted that the board had “waited patiently for change and for a report from the department,” but had seen neither, leading to the formation of the ad hoc committee, comprised of Sabatier and District 1 Supervisor Moke Simon.
Ringen submitted a letter of resignation on June 15 after discussions with the committee had taken place. On Tuesday, she argued that many of the problems evident in her department can be traced to staffing issues.
After an employee resigned last month, Ringen noted, her department was brought back to a 50 percent staffing vacancy. Though the department has recruited 17 treasury-tax collection employees in the last year and a half, she said, most of those recruitment efforts have not been successful, with just one or two new employees staying in their positions.
Addressing the citizen complaints to which Sabatier referred, Ringen said complaints about taxes are “the nature of the business,” and said that such complaints would not go away with her departure from office.
“We will still continue after I retire to get those complaints,” she said.
Supervisor Brown, arguing that Ringen should not need to resign over staffing-related problems, noted that recent staffing concerns raised by Sheriff Brian Martin had pushed the board of supervisors to act on a remedy for the situation. Brown stressed the board’s responsibility in finding a similar solution in the current case.
“This falls back on us,” Brown said.
Ringen’s intended departure comes as major structural changes are planned for the treasurer-tax collector’s office.
In a move that would see Lake County follow in the footsteps of several counties in California, the offices of the treasurer-tax collector and the auditor-controller may be consolidated into one. According to Deputy County Administrative Officer Matthew Rothstein, the change, which was recently authorized through a state law (AB 632) written for that sole purpose, could not be made until the end of the elective term of both offices at the outset of 2023.
