Our endorsements for the California State Board of Equalization – Pasadena Star News

On their Nov. 3 ballots, voters will fill all four district seats on the state’s most obscure elected body, the California State Board of Equalization. 

Each of the four districts on the ballot has about 10 million residents, meaning BOE members represent populations larger than entire states. 

A fifth seat on the board is held ex officio by the state controller, currently Democrat Malia Cohen, who is separately running for reelection against Republican Herb Morgan.

The board was established in 1879 with the second and current Constitution of California and is the only elected tax board among the 50 states. Its original mandate, as the name indicates, was to equalize taxation among the state’s counties. Once boasting considerable authority, however, it is currently a shell of its former self. 

In 2017 the California Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown greatly reduced the board’s powers with the passage of Assembly Bill 102. Most powers were shifted to two new bureaucracies whose directors are appointed by the governor: the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration and the Office of Tax Appeals. 

Among other duties, the board still oversees 58 county tax assessors, establishes statewide property tax rules and standards, assesses and collects the private railroad car tax and administers the alcoholic beverage tax and the tax on insurers.

We talked to five of the six candidates running for the three districts covering parts of Southern California. 

District 1: Shannon Grove

District 1 sprawls from part of San Bernardino County through the Central Valley and Sacramento, reaching California’s northeastern counties. Republican Shannon Grove of Bakersfield has been a state senator since 2018 and prior to that a member of the Assembly.

She founded and is the CEO of Continental Labor and Staffing Resources, a Bakersfield-based staffing agency. A generally reliable defender of taxpayer interests in Sacramento, Grove vows to “get in there, dive in and look at what can be done” to help out taxpayers. She said she especially would be responsive to “my farmers,” a nod to the economic backbone of the district. 

Democrat Nelson Esparza has been on the Fresno City Council since 2019 and currently is its president. He has worked as an economics instructor at Fresno City College and previously served on the county’s board of education . 

Esparza said the BOE’s relationship with county assessors should combine “accountability mechanisms and all the support that’s offered.” He also called for more “public outreach so people know the board is there for them,” a fine idea considering how few know the board even exists.

While both candidates are perfectly credible candidates for the seat, we give the nod to Grove given her mix of private sector experience and breadth of experience considering matters at a statewide level. 

District 3: Mike Gipson

District 3 covers Los Angeles County. Both candidates in this race are Democrats, with self-described labor organizer Samuel Sukaton facing off against Assemblyman Mike Gipson.

Samuel Sukaton is identified on the ballot as a labor union organizer. Repeated attempts over a month to interview him were unsuccessful. He is the only BOE candidate in the region who favors gutting Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax limitation initiative, “to raise new revenue with things like split-roll,” meaning much higher taxes for business properties. He also has served in leadership for the Democratic Socialists of America-LA.

Gipson has served in the Assembly since 2014 and before that was chief of staff for then-BOE Chairman Jerome Horton. In our interview, he said the 2017 reform “disenfranchised” taxpayers, lamenting that now a “mom-and-pop business has to pay court costs, pay a lawyer to litigate it in superior court and wait months and months to be heard.” 

For the board as it currently is, he would make its website more accessible in different languages and easier to navigate. 

As a legislator, Gipson was the principal coauthor of Senate Constitutional Amendment 4 in 2023, which was sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. It failed in committee, but would have restored parent-child home transfers without reassessment currently limited by Proposition 19. 

This is an easy call. Gipson understands the importance of Prop. 13 and the office he’s running for. His opponent is a far-left activist who ducks the press. 

District 4: Denis Bilodeau

District 4 goes from Orange and San Diego counties on the coast, all the way east through all of Imperial and Riverside counties and part of San Bernardino County.

Running to represent the district are Tom Umberg and Denis Bilodeau, both elected officials from Orange County. 

State Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat,  has served on and off in the Legislature going back to 1990. Umberg said that, based on his conversations with current members of the BOE, the board’s technology “is woefully inadequate.” He wants to use artificial intelligence to make sure the “big guys are actually paying their fair share,” while, conversely, “individual homeowners, individual property owners are also being treated fairly.”

Bilodeau, a civil engineer, also serves as the president of the Orange County Water District, mayor pro tem of the city of Orange, and president of the Orange County Taxpayers Association. 

“My role on the BOE just would be to make sure that the taxes are assessed correctly,” Bilodeau said. “Not too much, and not too little.” He also argued the board needs to do more public engagement, including holding town halls around the state so people can “voice their opinions about taxation in California.”

Bilodeau notes he is particularly concerned with considering appeals on public utility assessments, which the BOE is regularly asked to do, and vows to ensure assessments are not excessive, “because the taxes flow to the ratepayers’ bills.”

While both candidates have their merits, we consider their record on taxpayer interests. 

In the city of Orange, Bilodeau broke with a majority of his council colleagues and opposed putting on the Nov. 3 ballot Measure I, an increase to the city sales tax. Umberg, meanwhile, received almost exclusively D and F grades on HJTA’s scorecards of lawmakers going back to 2019 due in part to his general support for lowering approval thresholds for certain local tax measures. He has, to his credit, received a C grade in the taxpayer group’s 2025 ratings.

Accordingly, we endorse Bilodeau for his stronger pro-taxpayer bonafides.