Fresno County supervisors claim county Assessor Paul Dictos has been overcharging developers in real estate transaction fees and have threatened to take him to court. If they sue, they’ll have to pick up the tab on his legal fees, Dictos argues.
At issue is a $75 fee levied under state legal code for real estate transactions and how many times it should be charged to developers. Dictos has interpreted the fee to be charged per parcel in the transaction, noting hundreds of parcels could be included, while the board has argued the fee is to be applied once per transaction up to $225.
Dictos has interpreted the $225 cap in the legal code to apply differently, according to a letter form his attorney, Patience Milrod.
A letter warning Dictos of a potential lawsuit written by County Counsel Doug Sloan says Dictos is the only department head in all the state’s 58 counties who interprets the law his way.
This headbutting over the interpretation came to a head March 18 after the board sent a letter threatening a potential lawsuit if Dictos did not change his interpretation of when the fees apply. Milrod argued in her response that the county under state code would have to pay for legal fees faced by Dictos in such a lawsuit.
“The county and Mr. Dictos have a shared interest in applying the statute in a way that faithfully gives effect to its language and that accomplishes the Legislature’s aims,” she wrote. “The county has no power to insist the recorder exercise his discretion to interpret the statute in a particular way.”
The assessor-recorder office is an elected position, which Dictos has held about 16 years.
Milrod noted the supervisors have taken a stance that would bring less money into the county for projects like affordable housing.
Fresno County Assessor-Recorder Paul Dictos holds a bound volume of recorded documents, one of about 20,000 books of property records and other types of documents that are held by his office dating to the county’s origins in the 1850s. Fresno Bee file
The Office of County Counsel says Dictos is overcharging developers, according to county spokesperson Sonja Dosti.
“Also, while the goal of collecting more funding for affordable housing may be laudable, that in no way affects the legal interpretation,” she said in a statement. “The law could have been drafted more clearly, so either a clarification from the Legislature or a court appears to be necessary to resolve the matter.”
The office also interprets the state law differently as it comes to who pays any legal fees, Dosti noted.
The disagreement heated up after a March 17 board meeting in which the supervisors voted in closed session to return $10,000 to a developer who had been charged by Dictos under the law in question.
Dictos argues his office is not alone among assessors in having a different interpretation of the law, noting the law has some ambiguity, his letter says.
Both sides argue they’ll need an outside arbiter to weigh in, be it a judge, the state Legislature or Attorney General Rob Bonta.
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Reporter Thaddeus Miller has covered cities in the central San Joaquin Valley since 2010, writing about everything from breaking news to government and police accountability. A native of Fresno, he joined The Fresno Bee in 2019 after time in Merced and Los Banos.