Category: Consumer Help

A friendly face on tax day

With deadline fast approaching, Kathy Gloster helps a property owner pay his tax bill.

By the time zero hour arrived Thursday, the logistics had been locked down for weeks.

Blue vests were freshly dry-cleaned, clipboards loaded up with sample forms and cheat sheets, schedules ironed out with minute-by-minute precision.

All that was missing were the taxpayers. But soon, they showed up as well, completing a biannual ritual that, for the last three years, has sent Kathy Gloster and her team into first floor lobby of the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration to bring order and a touch of TLC to nobody’s favorite task:

Paying property taxes.

“Sometimes there are so many people in the lobby that we have to do crowd control,” said Gloster, a 10-year veteran with the county Treasurer and Tax Collector.

While the crowds were smaller than usual on this year’s April 10 deadline—Gloster hopes and assumes that’s because more people are paying online—the blue vest team was out in force, helping to keep things moving as lines swelled to up to 10 people deep.

Gloster, an assistant treasurer-tax collector, is charged with organizing the collection of the nearly 2.4 million tax bills issued by the county each year. A month ago, she started meeting with her staff to create a schedule for tax supervisors and managers to put in 90-minute shifts in the lobby. Their job is getting taxpayers to the right lines and making sure they have all their paperwork in order. Since property taxes come in two installments—one due on December 10, the other on April 10—the blue vest brigade hits the lobby twice a year to meet a (mostly) accepting public.

“You have people who are really excited because they are paying their first bill on the first property they’ve ever bought,” Gloster said. But others, she said tactfully, “are just maybe not as happy with you as you would like them to be.”

The vast majority of property owners pay by mail, online or by other arrangements, but about 2% come in person—no doubt more aware than anybody of the steep 10% penalty in store for those who pay late.

People love to hate the tax man, but the soft-spoken Gloster  insists that she and her team can win most folks over by extending a helping hand.

“When you tell someone you work in the tax collector’s office they say, ‘Oh, you do terrible things,’ ” Gloster said. “But when we get to help somebody, it’s a lot of fun. We can explain things to them.”

Many people come without their bills or, worse, are unable to pay the full amount. “They get that look in their eye that they can’t pay their taxes, and that’s kind of sad.” But the unhappiest taxpayers of all may be those who accidentally show up on income tax day—April 15. At that point, there’s nothing she can do, and the extra 10% is added to the bill. Gloster said she has seen penalties as high as $250,000 for a single parcel.

But most people just want to make their payment and get out of there as quickly as possible, and many offer thanks for the speedy help they receive.

One worker, Ingrid Fontenot, said she enjoys the whole routine.

“It’s a little tiring standing on your feet for an hour and a half, but it’s very fulfilling,” she said. ”I’ve gotten a lot of compliments about our process and how organized we are. It’s a good feeling.”

Meanwhile, the department gets bombarded by phone calls from people with questions about their bills or how to pay online or by mail. Gloster said her department fields about 23,000 calls in the month of April alone.

Gloster also has a cautionary tale for those who pay by mail. If a payment is postmarked by the deadline, it is considered “on time.” However, in this day of QR codes and alternative kinds of stamps, some envelopes don’t get postmarked. Paying online is the best way to make sure the payment is on time, Gloster said, but if you’re mailing it in, it’s a good idea to send it a few days early, just to be safe.

Posted 4/11/14

County has designs on voting

IDEO founder David Kelley has melded utility with elegance in his firm’s designs for famous clients.

It’s not easy to re-imagine the largest voting system in the nation, but it doesn’t hurt to have the company behind stand-up toothpaste on your team.

For the past year or so, Los Angeles County has been working closely with IDEO, the innovative Bay Area design firm, to help with the county’s multi-faceted initiative to update its antiquated voting apparatus. The challenge is a big one: The county’s system serves some 4.8 million registered voters in 11 languages at some 5,000 polling places, and is currently using technology that dates, in some cases, to the 1960s.

So in an effort to think creatively about the future, the office of the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk and the committees guiding the county’s Voting Systems Assessment Project reached out to a firm whose groundbreaking design work goes back to Apple’s first computer mouse in the 1980s.

“We wanted to focus on innovation, and we were attracted by their philosophy of design that’s human-centered,” says Efrain Escobedo, governmental and legislative affairs manager for the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office. IDEO, he says, studies “what the experience is underlying a project—whether it’s a filling station or a vegetable peeler—rather than just designing around what’s cheapest.”

County officials say there’s no plan to drop this popular feature of voting.

Created as a merger of four design firms—one in Palo Alto, two in San Francisco and one in London—IDEO, which is now global, specializes in cutting-edge product and organizational design. One of its founders, David Kelley, was close friends with the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, whose elegant products became a computer industry standard. But IDEO’s work has run the gamut, from upright dispensers for Crest toothpaste to a rethinking of school lunches.

Initially, Escobedo says, the county learned about IDEO during an experiment with crowdsourcing in which the county put out a call for ideas on the future of voting through OpenIDEO, an online platform and community. But in early 2013, after conducting its own extensive data-gathering process, the county engaged the company’s consultants to help analyze the research under a series of short-term agreements worth about $1 million.

Among IDEO’s objectives is a rethinking of the traditional voting machines so they not only accommodate voters in a multiplicity of languages and settings, but are also universally accessible no matter the voter’s age, education, familiarity with the process or physical abilities.

“We’ve delivered three really, really rough concepts that we’re working now to whittle down into one,” says Sarah Rienhoff, IDEO’s public sector lead on the voting project. Visual renderings and mock-ups have ranged from boxy one-stop, hands-free voting stations to lightweight podium-like contraptions that can be easily moved around by poll workers and stored.

To augment data the county gathered, IDEO consultants examined on their own the extremes of the voting spectrum—newly naturalized citizens, older voters, young voters, people who had stopped voting and people with physical limitations that impacted their use of the existing system.

That last group was especially important, in part, because advocacy groups for the disabled have sued over issues such as the lack of touch-screens and the paper ballot requirement—mandates that, they contend, make voting harder and less private for visually-impaired voters.

So, Rienhoff says, the group put a special emphasis on disabled voters. One focus group brought county staffers nearly to tears as a man with cerebral palsy talked about the alienation of being shunted off to vote in a separate booth for handicapped people.

Another exercise took the form of an educational field trip.

“We did ‘dining in the dark’ at Opaque, a restaurant in Santa Monica where all the [servers are] visually impaired or blind and the customers eat in a fully dark dining room,” says Rienhoff, adding that they went back the next day to interview their waiter—one of more than 44 individual interviews they conducted last spring.

The IDEO group also studied lottery kiosks as an example of a system in which decision-making is paired with convenience and observed elections in Pasadena and Compton to compare voting in diverse communities.

What’s more, the firm’s creative approach served to inspire the Registrar-Recorder staff, Escobedo says. Among other things, they created an “idea wall” in the executive office in Norwalk after visiting IDEO’s workspace.

As the project’s self-imposed 2016 deadline approaches, some broad outlines have begun to take shape. For one thing, Escobedo says, it is clear that the new system won’t include voting via Internet or smart phone, at least for now, due to security concerns.

That, however, doesn’t preclude the possibility of the vote-by-mail option morphing someday into a scanned ballot sent by encrypted email, or a digital tablet onto which voters can electronically upload their pre-marked decisions. Also, look for bigger ballots, voting machines with universal design and hands-free access and possibly a voting process that revolves less around a single day at a single polling place than, say, a 2-week voting “window” or community voting centers.

“By the end of the year, we hope, we’ll have an actual final design concept that we can begin to engineer,” says Escobedo, who expects to start prototyping some time next year.

One aspect of the process is unlikely to change, however: That little “I Voted” sticker?

“Oh, that’s a mandatory do-not-leave-out,” laughed Escobedo. “People love that. It’s not going anywhere.”

One possibility for future voters might be more portable voting machines, as seen in this IDEO rendering.

Posted 11/13/13