neighbor, virginia chaw. i have been a citizen of this city for more than three decades and have lived at 19 presidio terrace for more than 24 years. in fact i'm ghg oing to retire my current home, as well. my husband and i came to america to go to college in the 60's and became citizens in the 70's. san francisco is where we raised our two daughters. they're now working responsible adults in law and medicine. they were raised here, have many friends here and called san francisco home. we live the american dream as we've raised our family in san francisco, and i am proud that we have been paying our property taxes ever since we moved here in 1986. it would be extremely unfair if my rights to our common property were taken away when we, the community were not properly notified. i am also deeply concerned that we will be subjected to the demands of those who are not

even members of the san francisco community. i very much hope that you will consider the fairness of it all and do the right thing in rescinding the sale of our common property to an outside property. thank you. thank you very much for your consideration. >>president breed: thank you for your comments. next speaker, please. >> supervisors, my name is susan dossider. my husband and our family of seven have lived at number 2 presidio terrace for 23 years. we have raised our five children on this street. we adopted our youngest child at age three from khazkstan after she had been abandoned at two and a nav. clara was born here. she learned to play on the street and ride her bike on our

sidewalks. benjamin is in his third year of medical school. he is doing a dual degree in medicine and public health as he plans to go into global medicine, practicing pediatrics and in particular, pediatric infectious disease, hoping to make an impact on children's health in third world countries. he has called presidio terrace home since the age of four. and four our eldest child who is five years old when he moved here, presidio terrace is the one and only home he will ever know. jeremy died tragically in a helicopter crash on october 16, 2017, six weeks ago. we urge you to see us not only as a street, address, homeowners, but as individuals, a community, with history,

connection, commitment, and compassion. thank you very much. >>president breed: thank you for your comments. next speaker, please, and before the next speaker speaks, are there any other speakers on behalf of the rescission of the tax sale, please lineup on your left, your right-hand side of the chamber. proceed sir. >> supervisors, i am stephen m merill, boorn in san francisco 75 years. born here, raised here, lived my entire life. i paid taxes in san francisco for 50ers i can't, and in those 50 years, i've never been delinquent. we are not tax dodgers, the presidio terrace homeowners association accepts responsibility for inadvertently dropping the ball in the 199 0's, during the han off to a new accountant who failed to file a notice with the tax collector.

that could have easily been resolved in many ways in the past 20 years but has remained outstanding. the issue before you today is the sale of our common area without proper notification that's tot torely required. a -- on its website, the office of the treasury and tax collector describes its missions and responsibilities, including one, facilitate voluntary compliance with the city and tax laws, and to investigate and collect delinquent tax obligations. i respectfully ask the board to determine whether the tax collector carried the letters pertheir mission as publicly stated. fortunately, there is recourse through you.

you have the process to right a wrong, and we are asking you for basic fairness from our government, repudiation of this, and we want our property back. >> thank you for your comments. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon. my name is carrie weintraub. i'm the president of the presidio terrace homeowners association. when i received the letter from miss lamb and mr. cheng's representative on may 30th of this year, i was shocked to learn that unbeknownst to me and all of our neighbors, the city had sold our streets on-line two years prior. i have spent six months determining how this could have happened and tried to resolve this directly with the tax

collector and new owners. more than 20 years ago, a simple but critical over sight during an accountant transition was perp waited because nobody was aware of the tax obligation. we accept responsibility of this delinquency and we are making institutional changes to ensure that it never happens again, but we're here today to ask you to rescind the sale of the property which was unconstitutional because the tax collector proceeded with the auction, knowing he had not notified the interested party of the sale, in this case, 31 homeowners. we reached out on a number of occasions to miss lamb and mr. chang. i want to be clear that we do not have a personal issue with them. our interests are simply not aligned and we do not believe ownership by a third party would be good for us or for the

city. as homeowners, we have shared interests because we mutually benefit from the common area. this is why the neighborhood has functioned well for over a century, and we continued to maintain the common area even after it was sold. supervisors please rescind the sale and return the land to the homeowners it was created fore 112 years ago. >>president breed: thank you for your comments. thank you. are there any other members of the public who would like to speak in support of rescinding the sale, now is your chance. seeing none, public comment is closed. [ gavel [ gavel ]. >>president breed: and we will have a ten minute presentation from the treasurer-tax collector. >> good afternoon, supervisors.

jo jose cisneros, treasurer. i want to say that a contested sale is not good for me, my staff, or any of the parties involved. you've heard quite a bit about what the association thinks we could or should have done differently. i don't dispute that we could have done more. we can always do more, and we're certainly -- we've certainly learned quite a bit through this process that is already changing ways we will implement things in the future. what i want to be clear about today is we followed the rules in this case and carried out this auction in the correct way. i focused my staff's time and attention on parcels that were occupied, not on vacant lots and timeshares without engaged owners. in 2015, we used or research and outreach tools to protect

vulnerable san francisco homeowners, who needed attention, not a tax auction. our due process right to focus on people in homes is codi fied in state laws. there is a difference between them, and while we could have done more in 2015 before the sale of this parcel, i believe we acted reasonably with the information we had at the time. i regret this property was sold without the notification of the owners, and i wish our notifications would have caught the attention of the association, and yet the presidio terrace knew about this lot and they were quite familiar with the consequences of this nonpayment, given their loss of the parcel for nonpayment of taxes in the 1980's. in last 15 years, any of the h.o.a. members or their

property or management staff could have visited our website, called the city's 311 number or come into city hall to inquire about the taxes for the subject parcel or seen the substance parcel and the presidio terrace's association's own name in the examiner prior to the auction. under california law, the responsibility to pay taxes and update addresses rest with the property owner. i'll take sometime to review california law and what we did leading up to the auction, and then, i'll answer questions if you have any. as you know, it is our job to collect taxes for all the 209,000 parcels in san francisco. over 99% of property owners in san francisco pay their taxes on time and in full. every aspect of property tax collection is governed by state law, including when bills are due, penalties for late payment, and the process of

auctioning property to pay delinquent taxes. auctions serve two purposes. they allow the county to collect delinquent taxes, and they help secure future tax payments by getting a new owner in place. you've heard a lot about what we didn't do in 2015. i want to explain what we did. when we planned the tax auction. once we had the list of approximately 600 parcels eligible for auction, a team of two to three staff people worked the list. first, they identified any church, nonprofit or government owned property that might be tax exempt and worked with those owners and the assessor to determine if they were eligible for auction. next, they determined any property that could have been occupied. these could be single-family homes, multifamily residences or even undevelop

[ inaudible ] -- up to three times to make sure all homeowners and tenants are aware of the impending auction. in 2015, the taxes on these parcels were paid in full after. i chose to exercise discretion as permitted under the code and with the consent of the city attorney's office to remove these properties from the auction list to serve the best interest of the public and the county. these were not easy cases. all required significant engagement and partnership with social services, including adult protective services and the mayor's office of housing.

with the shared goal to payoff the taxes owed while protecting any vulnerable residents from displacement. in one case, due to our efforts to locate an owner or resident of an occupied parcel just blocked from the discovered parcel was discovered deceased in her home. three properties i removed from the 2015 auction have, due to the collaborative work of many city agencies have since paid off and returned to the tax roll. i explain this because i think it's important to understand the amount of research and notificati notification we do when we're dealing with people's homes. however, the railroad majority of parcels available for auction in 2015 were abandon abandoned -- although the term invoice can't lot to most people would imply a parcel of land that's ready to be

developed, that's not the case in san francisco. typical undeveloped pieces of land are called lives, and underwater lots that were parcelized long ago but cannot be developed because they're submerged in the bay. the vacant lots that reach auction generally have been lacking an engaged property owner and for all intents and purposes seem abandoned. the subject property in dispute matched this description, and there were no tax records of payment for the 15 year period between 2000 and 2015. so how were the included parcels and the substance parcel handles? our office sent notices to two categories of people. first, the owner of record, and second any recorded lienholders for all parcels on the tax auction list. for the owner of record, we

relied on the last known mailing record listed in the assessor's data babase. as we now know, the last -- so identify recordedlene holders, we follow the laws in the california tax sale manual, and engaged two vendors, the same that are used by other vendors across the state to search for the owners on the auction list. their report which was completed in february 2015 identified owners in 2510 through their lot and plot. i want to stop here for a moment because the association's brief lists several reported documents they claim we should have found, however, none of the documents

we list were specific to this parcel. i'll go into more detail later about how we can change the search protocol for future automobile accidents. back in 2015, we sent notices of the auction via certified mail. of the 1,480 certified mail notices, 58% were returned and marked by the united states postal service as undelivered. again, this is not surprising as many of these vacant lots are considered abandoned. we then published the complete list with the block and owners name on march 16, the 22nd, and 26th of 2015. we also posted the list on our website where it remained for the public and potential bidders to view in the list leading up to the auction. 74 owners paid their outstanding taxes after the notices were mailed, and these parcels were removed from the auction list. two weeks before the auction, our contractor for action

posted the bids on their website. bids for auction hosts the on-line auction between april 17 and april 25, 2015. all properties were timeshares or vacant lots. there were no occupied parcels offered for auction. 57 properties sold during that auction generating $281,338. of the properties sold, 56 were have a left-hand turn lot vacant lots, and one was a timeshare. our office then prepared transfer deeds to the properties and sent notices of sale and any available excess pros to the prior -- proceeds to the prior owners. parties had one year from that date to the new owners deed to

claim any excess proceeds -- >>president breed: mr. cisneros, i'm going to have to stop you because if i allow you time, i'm going to have to allow other speakers the same. >>supervisor peskin: treasure tax collector cisneros, a few questions, and if you don't know the answer to this, i think i know part of the answer to this because out of the 35 homeowners, as least three that testified today were actually owners the last time that the property -- the street property parcel was taken for nonpayment of taxes. d do you happen to know, out of the universe of 35 property owners, how many of them were around in 1983 when the state took the property for nonpayment of taxes the first time? >> we took a quick look at the

assessor's database, and we thought we identified seven of the 35. >>supervisor peskin: okay. thank you for that. and then, relative to the reasonableness standard, can you tell us, once it came back as undeliverable, what additional steps you or your staff took to attempt to have -- make contact with the owner? >> sure. we rely on state law and state controller's procedural manual. we posted -- we published the list of auction items in the paper, and we made it available on our website, and we brought it here to the board of supervisors in a public hearing, with the entire list of parcels, and -- and those were the items that were available to do at that time. what i think we've learned since then is we certainly could have taken these hundreds and hundreds of vacant lots and

timeshares and done more work to find out more. there's actually a procedure that we're familiar with through our debt collection site of our shop called skiptracing that actually broadens out a search and looks for more information related to either debtors or property owners. certainly, if we had done that at that time, we would have identify the presidio terrace association address. but certainly, we wouldn't do something like that for just selected neighborhoods. if we were going to do that, we would have done that for all of the hundreds of vacant lots and returned addresses for all in the list. and we chose to focus on occupy parcels that year. we are looking into doing that for all of the parcels included in the automobile accidents. >> section 370 of the revenue tax code which clearly says that -- i mean, it states that

even as long as you send it to the last known mailing address, you've discharged your duty, even if the party does not receive the mail notice, but there is another provision that's discussed in the briefs about parties of interest, and interes there's a question as to whether parties of interest are lienholders, whether they're easement holders, whether they're adjoining property owners. can you tell us what you consider or what the law or rules consider to be parties of interest? >> sure. thank you very much, supervisor. parties of interest, as you stated, are parties that have any kind of real interest in the property. that could include debts owed, and therefore executed through alene or parties that have an easement. the way that you find parties of interest is through a search of recorded documents in the

county recorder's files. what the association's folks have pointed out is a number of documents that included information about the presidio terrace association and their current address. what they're not mentioning, though, is that none of those documents included the block and lot of the parcel that was auctioned; in other words, the private street classified as a vacant lot. that is why, in the standard search, those documents were not located. in the future, if we do the broader search and search on more key pieces of information, we certainly could find those documents, yes. >> -- >>supervisor peskin: so what you're telling me is the doctrines, covenants, and regulations of the homeowners

association do not include the street parcel. >> that's correct yes. >> and you did that level of research prior to the sale. >> yes. the parties we contracted to do that search. >>supervisor peskin: thank you. >>president breed: thank you, supervisor peskin. supervisor. >>vice president brandon: -- >>supervisor kim: >> actually, those were my two questions, the standards that you hold reasonable and practical, but i just wanted to make sure i understood your statement in that parties of interest are not only the lienholders, but those that have easement, and you're saying that based on the information you had in 2015, you did look for easement interest holders, and you would not have been able to find that. >> in the time of -- yes, supervisor. in the type of search we performed, which is the only,

really unique identifier for any lot, which is its block and lot in the assessor's system, we searched through all of the recorded documents available in this county, and no, none of them turned up because again, to the previous supervisor's point, even the c.c. and r.'s for the association, which might engage and talk about this parcel did not include the block and lot which are the unique identifiers of the parcel which mean they are not found. again, that doesn't mean they could have been found with a broader search, and that's the type of work we look forward to doi doing. >>supervisor kim: and you mentioned that of the 1,480 parcels that were up for auction. >> notices that were returned, mailed to the 600 and something parcels that were available for the auction. >>supervisor kim: right, but of those, 167 are vacant lots,

and is there a process by which the treasurer's office can -- assessors office can differentiate between those different lots. >> there's not anything that i'm aware of in the system. not to say we couldn't bring more information readily available to us as we prepare for the auction. >>supervisor kim: thank you very much. >>president breed: thank you supervisor kim. supervisor cohen? >>supervisor cohen: what's interesting such a situation happened in my side of town, on the southeast, where there have been notices and vacancies posted. my question is i'm looking to hear of the systematic changes that you're making in your

office so that this type of mistake doesn't happen moving forward. can you describe to us the changes that you've implemented it? >> absolutely, supervisor. so as i was saying, we're familiar through our debt collection techniques is a process called skiptracing. it's something we're very familiar with. this includes looking at plenty of databases, looking at plenty of documents, not just on block and lot, but on name of property owner, searching website databases, telephone databases, all those types of things. these are all the things that we use to find folks that owe considerable amounts of money to the city. if we had taken the 500, say, parcels on the auction list and asked one of our debt collection people to do skiptracing techniques on all of those, we estimate it would take about 25 to 30 days of that person's time and work to perform skiptracing on all

these parcels. that's something we're looking at doing in the future that's a significant investment of time, but it's something we can continue to grow our information over time by doing that work bit by bit over time. there are certainly, as i admitted at the beginning, more we could have done and more we're looking at in the future, but i'm confident we followed all the rules and laws that governed how we were to dpo the tax auction in 2015. >>supervisor cohen: well, speaking of rules and laws, throughout this hearing, there was significant conversation given to case law and cases that were cited. >> right. >>supervisor cohen: could you share your interpretation in particular of it. from what i understand, the cases summarized indicate that when a parcel is occupied, meaning, a resident, it's a different notification process versus when it's vacated.

>> certainly. supervisor, the respondent has brought forward a number of cases as to what should have been done before an auction, including a case decided by the united states supreme court, and what those cases cited, and also which california laws requires, is in all those pieces of property is there was an occupied property on those parcels. clearly, the court was saying you can't stand behind a piece of mail and take away someone's home. california state law set that same high bar for occupied pieces of properties. what's -- i'm not a lawyer, but what's not clear to me is any of those cases, including the united states supreme court case in deciding this and making this clear, about occupied parcels, if that extends to vacant parcels with

no structure and nobody residing on them. obviously, a legal expert or a judge would have to determine that. >>supervisor cohen: thank you. thank you. >>president breed: thank you, supervisor cohen. supervisor tang? >>supervisor tang: thank you very much. so we received a note from an employee who, i guess he's a former employee of the treasurer and tax collector's office. he referenced the state policy manuals, which says that one of the first steps of conducting a sale is to properly identify what is being sold so that it can be correctly processed, and so i'm just wondering, to what level that has been done. i know that supervisor kim asked that -- touched upon that point. >> sure. >>supervisor tang: you know, since development of tools such as the property information map and so forth, i know that we can plug these in pretty easily and be able to figure out what the block and lot -- you know, what they actually correspond with, so i was just wondering, in terms of following this, i

guess, protocol that is supposedly in your office, what actually is done to properly identify the property being sold? >> i appreciate the question. again, what that -- i believe that memo is referring to is all the laws and procedures in the state controller's manual about how to exercise property tax automobilctions. we did that, we did the search i described earlier, looking by block and lot to find all the relates parties of interest. what certainly the law requires for occupied parcels is more, and we also did that more and focused a lot, even more than what the law requires for occupied parcels in the 2015 auction because that really was our top concern, making sure that we did not displace any particularly vulnerable person in san francisco who was occupying their home. however, what this auction certainly signifies for us is

we could certainly do more, even fore the vacant lots and other parcels on the auction list. we started to do some of those measures for the auctions we did earlier this year and will continue to grow those in future ones. >>supervisor tang: i do think that what you just said is really important, that even if you were to rely on the documents from the assessor's office, the issue is their office, they can't change records, right? they are recording documents based on transactions or deeds being recorded and so forth, so -- so i think that there is -- we cannot just rely on that, as well. again, that's, i think where both of your offices are probably challenged is that you are searching for information that other people are providing to you, and so i think that same tool, such as the property information that's been developed in the last couple of years is extremely helpful, and

i would encourage using a broader array of tools to really properly identify what is being sold, and it sounds like your office is open to that. in terms of the conversation around the supreme court cases and the california appellate decisions, i know that you spoke to a distinction between occupied and unoccupied properties, but there -- from my understanding, i -- i did not understand that the -- the u.s. supreme court has a distinction between occupied or unoccupied property when property is -- a property right is being taken away from an individual. and then, furthermore, in the california appellate course case, bonas versus trans-america title, although it's an old case from 1982, it posed a very, very similar situation where, you know, there was someone who had paid property taxes and didn't know that there was another part of their home or a second lot that

was not recorded, and then, subsequently, they didn't pay property taxes on that, and the resolution was that -- or at least what was cited was that it was a constitutionally required as a prerequisite to diverting plaintiffs of their property to actually post on the property. in my mind, reading these cases and the summaries, i do feel there isn't really a distinction, although i do appreciate your office has taken extra steps if you do know that they're occupied. but i -- i would say, again, based on case law that we really shouldn't have a distinction, and if anyone owns anything, there should be proper notice. and of course, the notice thing is a huge sticking point for me, too. i don't read, for example, the paper copy, sorry, of the examiner, the chronicle, i read the on-line version, so if i didn't know that something was -- a tax wasn't paid, i had no reason to believe that there

was a separate block and lot, i wouldn't know to go to those publications, or i wouldn't know to follow a board of supervisors budget committee meeting and punk ch in the blo and lots and make sure those were corp. responding to my property. so i think especially with the case law that they've cited, specific examples of what reasonable notice should be, i do believe posting is something that is -- that should be required. >>president breed: thank you supervisor tang. supervisor ronen. . >>supervisor ronen: it will impact a property owner to lose a piece of property that the notice requirements would be much higher than for a vacant

lot, toso i just want to just understand where you're coming from, where you had two separate procedures for property that had an occupied unit on it and higher noticing standards and going as far as to working with other city departments to provide social services to people on those site. that seems very appropriate to me and makes a lot of sense. we always have limited resources in the city, and we have to decide how we're going to use them, and that -- your discretion and -- and decision on how to use those resources, i just -- i want to offer another perspective, make a lot of sense to me. i just wanted to offer that. but i have a question -- another question to you. if this board decided to undo the auction, what would that mean in terms of the other properties that were auctioned off in 2015 -- and tell me if these numbers are correct in terms of what i could surmise from the documents, that 389

properties were auctioned -- were put up four auction in 2015 a 2015 and 57 were actually sold. so what happened to those properties that weren't sold, just out of cure i doniousity? >> they remain in delinquent status, and our power to sell status, and likely will be included in the next auction. >> okay. and those other, i guess, 56 properties that were sold, what would you do? would you rescind those sales, as well? i mean, we don't know who those owners are. they got the same amount of notice as the -- as the appel -- or the homeowners in this case. i'm just curious. >> sure, sure. great question. the treasurer's office has the power to undo or rescind the sale only for one year past the date of the sale, so we -- our time in our office to do

anything with those sales has passed. state law, however, does allow a county board of supervisors, i believe, with no time limit, to rescind a sale, which is why this matter is before you all today. with regard to the 50-some parcels that were auctioned, only the one that we're talking about today is before you in this matter, and so the rest would be unchanged. >>supervisor ronen: that's right. that makes sense. i had forgotten about that. since this has all come to light, have you gone back to look at those 56 other properties to see if there was a situation that was analogous to this one? i mean, some aretinely pieces of property that people don't care about, but is there any other piece of property that you think people just really didn't realize that it was sole sold. >> to be perfectly honest,

since this matter came to our attention, we've been focused on this matter, making sure we understand what happened, and that's why i'm here to talk to you today. i'm pretty confident that the rest of the vacant lots are truly small and abandoned. we do work with members of property owners when they contact us, in fact, to a point we've talked about a couple seconds ago, we actually this year, in a list published in the examiner, had a property owner contact us who pointed out that there was a mistake in the causing that -- their property to be shown as delinquent in taxes and listed in the newspaper as a delinquent property. believe me, if we ever find that we've made a mistake, we will do everything necessary to correct that mistake. we did that in this case. we will continue to do research on any of the parcels that are still up for auction and show

delinquent opportunities because we don't want to see something like this happen again. >>supervisor ronen: thank you. >>president breed: thank you, supervisor ronen. supervisor safai? >>supervisor safai: thank you, madam president. the thing that really sticks in my mind about this situation, that jumped out at me is the word association. this is the presidio terrace association, and that was the owner of record. association, to me, implies, just based on the generic definition of it, a group of people with the same interest, and so in my reading of this list, this entire list of people that were sold in 2015, there are only three associations, and so i kind of come back to that. i brought that to the attention of you yesterday. it seems to me like, based on your memo, based on your arguments of doing the additional step -- and i

respect the fact that you do additional steps for those that might need additional help based on their income, but in this particular situation, the word association to me implies an additional group of people. so i would say that it implies additional steps, and then, that kind of leads to the parties of interest. and so -- and i also feel like the improper classification of this land is kind of where it begins for you. you just get a list, and it says block and lot, and it says empty land. i don't see this as empty land. this is actually developed land. this has a street on it, it has a sidewalk on it. it's very unique in that sense, and to see the word association, and then, to see that this has been improperly classified, it seems to me there were a few flags that went up or could have gone up. one thing that needs to happen in the future, i would say, for any auction, regardless of the

classification, an assessor map needs to be associated with that, because if an assessor map had been associated with this particular sale, you would have seen immediately that this was a private street and it had a relationship with the additional properties. so oftentimes, it's almost like you're working or your staff or your team is working with blind information. you're just looking at a number on a screen. it gives you aclassification that says an empty lot, and you assume it's just a vacant piece of land that has not been developed. so i think that the problem began with the improper classification. i think that someone in your office -- there should have been a flag that went up when they saw the word association. again, i only see three of them on this list: knob hill association, and then, there's two more, and the presidio terrace is one, so i kind of lean toward what supervisor tang has said, where the case law basically does not differentiate between vacant

skpa no and not vacant, and the fact that this impliez it was an association, other than the one you were sending it to. there has been no precedent about any flags going up with regard to the word association and implication that there would be multiple parties of interest. >> supervisor, your comments are well founded and i think, again, like i said before, we can learn a lot from this experience. we already are changing our practices, and we will continue to look at these lots, even things categorized as vacant lots more closely. >>supervisor safai: and just to follow up on that, with regard to the improper classification in my opinion, is there going to be a pattern going forward where you would have the ability for all of these sales to have access to the assessor maps? >> i'm sure we can access anything that's part of the

city's family of departments available to us. >>supervisor safai: right. and then, what about in terms of vacant lots, has there been a practice that's been changed to notice adjacent property owners, similar to what we do with 311 notification or 312 notification, not just that there's the immediate interested party, but that the surrounding individuals. >> you know, there's some concern around that, but sometimes, people who are facing financial difficulties, and their property even prochg power to sell and an auction list might be benefited by having their neighbors know about their predicament but others might feel it's ae an invasion of their privacy. that's something we could consider, but i'd want to do more research and conversations with you.

>> i >>supervisor safai: i'm sorry. >> that's not to say it's not worth doing. >>supervisor safai: okay. i don't have any other questions. >>president breed: thank you, supervisor safai. supervisor peskin. >>supervisor peskin: so going back to the previous issue that i raised, treasurer cisneros, because to me, this really hinges on this section 3701 and whether or not easement holders were noticed, and section 3701 of the revenue and taxation code refers to the parties of interest as defined in section 4675 of the revenue and taxation code, and specifically, in that, it says that any person with title of record to all or any portion of

the property, and that would be an easement holder, so my question to you is the easements of the 35 parcels, are those of record? >> well, i -- again, i believe of record means recorded. >>supervisor peskin: correct. >> that that is what record means, so we searched the county's database and history of recorded documents. when we search by unique block and lot for this parcel, none of them -- none of those recorded documents show any parties of interest. now, what i think that shows us, as i stated, is that we would be benefited by doing a search on something other than just block and lot. >>supervisor peskin: i'm just trying to make sure that you complied with the letter of the law, and based on your representation, it sounds like you did. i also just have to say -- and i realize this is a more etherreal concept.

relative to the concept of notice, insofar as 20% of the extant owners, 27 of 35 were owners when this property was tax defaulted before is indeed a form of notice. i mean, i'm not sure how that word and how that history did not travel around to the association over time. i mean, i don't know that any of these people can answer that, but it is a form of historic notice. >>president breed: okay. since that was a comment and not a question, we will move onto the purchaser of the property. he will have up to ten minutes for presentation. >> thank you. govern, president breed and board of supervisors. my name is shepherd kopp, and i have the opportunity to

represent tina cheng and michael -- and they are the owners of presidio property, and they bought this property fair and square in an auction that was in compliance with all the laws by the tax collector, as you just heard. i have a couple of remarks prepared today but before i start, i just want to tell you that i learned a couple of facts today that i think are very important for your decision including the fact that the tax collector did check to see if any of the easements that have been ballyhooed by the homeowners association that put them into this category of parties of interest such that they were entitled to receive written notice of the sale, that the tax collector looked for those records and was unable to find them. and that is very important because all the cases in which all the courts have considered

these types of tax sales say that you should not look at the situation as it looks a year or two down the line or post hoc, in the latin, but you should look at these situations ex ante, how the situation looked to the tax collector and to the government at the time the tax sale was conducted. and that's how it looked to mr. cisneros, and i agree with his statements to you that he complied with the letter of the law, and when i say law, i mean, the statutes because i don't think we should be getting into a discussion on constitutional due process rights as those have been elucidated in the courts in california and the united states supreme court because i think those arguments are better left to a court of law. the second thing i learned today, as i heard some of the comments -- public comments by

the homeowners on presidio terrace, and i found it noteworthy that the only comments you heard in support of rescission were made by the people that live on the street or in one case, a person that lives right across the street. you didn't hear an outwe willi willing -- outwelling of support by the community for rescission of this sale. but i did tell you that some of the homeowners told you that there had been an audit, and this have been sales of these houses in the last several years. lo and behold, the audit didn't turn up any taxes that were owed on this street and neither did the audit that were done in conjunction with the sales of the houses, yet. yet. the homeowners association wants you to put mr. cisneros to that onerous task of doing

more due diligence than these homeowners themselves did in selling their property or buying their property or conducting their own internal audit, and that's on the heels of having already failed to pay their taxes in the 70's, leading up to losing the property in 1983, when it was deeded to the state, and then, they finally redeemed it two years later. so i would agree with the comments made by supervisor peskin that that is a form of historical notice that the -- not only the individual homeowners who then lived there, but also the homeowners association as an entity, because that entity has, should have some historical knowledge and should be charged with that historical knowledge that when you don't pay your taxes, when you don't keep an address that is current on file with the tax assessor, guess what? you might lose your property. it also provides historical

notice to the homeowners association as if anything else was needed that they were not going to get letters from the tax collector individually to each house, telling them hey, you've got an easement of beneficial use for this terrace, and you might want to make sure the taxes get paid. they were on notice that even though they had an easement, it wasn't recorded in a way that was sufficient to have the tax collector send them notice of sale as a party of interest. now as i stated in the brief that i filed, i believe the board's role here should be limited. i believe the board should determine what the facts are and decide whether or not the tax collector complied with the statutes, with the law that governs tax sales in california. and once you do that, i believe

your inquiry should be at an end and you should not delve into these questions of constitutional due process that have been raised by the homeowners association. i believe those arguments are more appropriately raised in a court of law and they will be addressed in a court of law. a lawsuit is already on file in which the homeowners association has sued not only my clients but the san francisco to quiet title to the property and undoubtedly, that court will address the constitutional due process issues. the problem with taking up those issues here, and i think supervisor tang, you made some mention of this, is that these cases all turn on individual facts, and yes, i do believe that the cases cited by the homeowners association are distinguishable from the facts here in many important ways, not least of which is the fact that the jones case deals with

an occupied parcel of land and so does the bonas case, and the jones case, for whatever it's worth, stands for the proposition that yes, if the tax collector knows that the notice of sale has not been received, and it's an occupied parcel, then, he's got to do something more if it is practicable. that's the critical phrase in the supreme court holding there. in my view, the tax dlektor did everything that was practicable and should be commended for that. the state statutory scheme recognizes that there is this distinction between occupied parcels and unoccupied parcels such as presidio terrace because it requires more of a tax collector when it's an occupied parcel. in that situation, i believe it's 3707.4 -- i may have the numbers transposed a little

bit, 3707.7 requires the tax collector to go to the location of the occupied parcel and try to contact the owner and if the owner's not there, then post notice of an impending sale. and it's significant that the state code does not require that extra step or steps when we're talking about a vacant lot, and there's likely a very solid policy reason behind that decision by the legislature not to require that because in virtually every single case, it's not going to accomplish anything with a neglected, abandoned vacant lot. going out there and posting a notice is not going to effectuate the notice that the tax collector intends to deliver if possible. now, i think that if the board were to make the decision to rescind this sale, that would set a very dangerous precedent

going forward. not only does it potentially invalidate every one of the sales that occurred not only this tax auction, but at previous tax auctions because there appears to be no statute of limits under which a person that loses their property can come and petition the board for rescission, but i think it makes the tax collector's job onerous if not impossible because how in the world is he going to go out and post notice on all these vacant lots, many of which are not even -- some of them are underwater? i want to finish with something that happened a little bit earlier today, when one of my clients, michael chang was outside talking to a reporter, and the reporter posed the question to him, don't you feel sorry for the people that own the houses on the street?

and i want to make clear that we are not unsympathetic to the plight of the homeowners of presidio terrace. i think some of the parade of horrible is not going to happen. they've been enjoying the street since it was sold, and i don't think that's going to change, but i thought my client, michael chang's answer was instructive. he said look, we don't have anything against them at people, but if i was in their shoes, and i didn't pay my taxes, such that my property was taken once, and i had to redeem it from the state and get it back and then i went right back to that practice of not paying my property taxes, then yeah, i would expect that that piece of property would be sold from me and i wouldn't complain about it. thank you. >>president breed: thank you very much. colleagues, do you have any questions or comments?

seeing -- supervisor kim. >>supervisor kim: thank you, mr. kopp. i had just a few questions. one, i noted in the brief that you wrote, you know, what you considered appropriate and appropriate for the board to consider in today's hearing, and i'm just curious why you believe that what the board -- that the board should limit their inquiry today to simply what the statute that governs the california tax code -- why you believe that we are limited to that question solely versus some of the due process claims that have come up here? and i guess specifically is there anything in the state statute which entrusts the board of supervisors with the power to rescind these tax sales with sort of a limited role in what it can consider. >> to answer that part of your question, i don't any there's anything in the code that specifically prohibits this body from considering constitutional due process

questions, so i think if you choose to do so, you can do so, but i could probably demonstrate it visually by showing you a stack of, i don't know, 10 or 15 decisions, which is a small percentage of the cases that i've read, and i think to really grapple with these issues, you need to read these cases because they all turn on the facts. >>supervisor kim: so the last time you came before this board, i remember that you made a number of due process and constitutional claims that you asked this board to consider. >> under a completely different statutory scheme, correct. >>supervisor kim: but the way i read your brief, your argument wasn't based on what we were considering, but that not every member of this board is a trained attorney, and that we simply don't have the resources or the analysis to really examine constitutional claims, so then, do you believe that we should not consider

them in ceqa appeals and other types of aviewed ka todjudicat and cases? it i see that there's a ton of case law in every ceqa appeal that we read that every member of this board does not read, yet we make these decisions on almost a weekly basis. >> well, i can't speak to other types of decisions you make involving other statutory schemes, and forgive me -- i didn't mean to disrespect any member of the board who happens not to be a lawyer. i've known a lot of nonlawyers in my lifetime, and most of them are very fine people. i -- i think in this case, to me -- and i don't know a thing

about ceqa -- but to me, the constitutional due process claims are of a sufficient complexity that i just think they're better fleshed out in a way that's fair to both sides in a court of law. and i mean, even the briefing the way it was setup here, i didn't know what cases they were going to cite, so i couldn't respond to them. so i -- >> n >>supervisor kim: no, no, i respect your opinion. i was just wondering if you knew there was something stated in the statute the limitations of the board on this issue. it's certainly not the issue in other cases, but it seemed your main argument was background and training of the members of the board of supervisors versus something that was explicitly written out in state statute or our tax code. >> no. there's no case or authority.