After no candidate received a majority of the vote in last month’s special election for assessor, the race now comes down to a Dec. 30 runoff between one contender highly qualified for the job and one seeking to politicize the office.
We urge voters not to be sucked in by some of the campaign diversions amplified during the runoff. Instead, look for a candidate to replace retiring Assessor Larry Stone who will focus on doing the job.
The assessor doesn’t set tax rates nor rules for how properties are taxed. Rather, the assessor only sets the values from which those taxes are calculated for more than 500,000 Santa Clara County properties.
Neysa Fligor, the current assistant assessor, understands this. Her opponent, Rishi Kumar, a former Saratoga City Council member, does not.
Our editorial board endorsed Fligor in the special election. The seriousness of this job and the unseriousness of her opponent compel us to weigh in again for the runoff.
Fligor is well-prepared to lead the assessor’s 250-person office. That’s because she has already been its second-in-command since July. In this position, she has overseen many of the office’s most important responsibilities, including producing its $750 billion assessment roll and managing the multi-million-dollar replacement of its outdated software system.
Fligor, who also serves on the Los Altos City Council, has earned the endorsement of both ex-Assessor Stone and many county unions, with which he often disagrees. However, on Fligor, they are unified. That itself is a testament to her competency for this position.
Being assessor, unlike a county supervisor or a city councilmember, isn’t about politics and policy setting. It’s about strict adherence to the laws governing appraising real and business properties. Fligor, it should be noted, is the only certified tax appraiser in this race.
Perhaps more importantly, though, is her experience as a lawyer. Before working as an attorney for HP between 2015 and 2024, Fligor was deputy counsel for Santa Clara County for nine years, during which time she represented the Assessor’s Office.
That experience in legal battles over appraisal disputes with many of the county’s giant corporations makes her exceptionally qualified to lead the office.
The same cannot be said about Kumar. The mechanical engineer and longtime tech executive has mounted three failed bids for Congress as a Democrat. Now, desperately looking for votes among senior citizens, he has rebranded himself as a Howard Jarvis-style anti-tax crusader by promising to fight to exempt them from property taxes.
In campaign text messages and emails for months, Kumar has made exempting anyone over 60 years old from property taxes his central platform. Now in the final stretch of the campaign, Kumar is going into overdrive telling voters that he’s spearheading a fledgling ballot initiative effort to exempt senior citizens from paying property taxes again.
It’s a red herring.
Completely aside from whether a senior tax exemption is good policy or not, it’s not the assessor’s job to lower or raise taxes or even collect them. In fact, the assessor doesn’t even calculate property taxes.
Kumar either doesn’t know what the assessor does or, worse, he’s deliberately misleading seniors attracted to the idea he’ll be slashing their property taxes to zero. Whether he’s ignorant or deceitful, Rishi Kumar should not be Santa Clara County’s next assessor.
Fortunately, voters have an excellent alternative in Neysa Fligor. We urge them to vote for her.
Vote-by-mail ballots will be sent by next week. The last day to request a vote-by-mail ballot replacement is Dec. 23. Early voting begins on Monday at the Santa Clara County Registrar’s office. Voting ends at 8 pm on Election Day, Dec. 30.