Yesterday
morning, combining civic duty and business, I drove to the county courthouse in
Santa Cruz. It was the day property tax was due, so I figured I’d pay in person
then see what my money was getting me by sauntering over to the superior court
clerk’s office to research a legal matter in connection with a project I’m
working on.
Most
years I pay my property tax in person. It makes it seem more like a civic
gesture than an anonymous sendoff of money, and it can be a social occasion as
well. More often than not I run into someone I know, either in line or because
they’re doing other business of their own at the county offices.
Last
year I went a day before the payment deadline and there was hardly any line at
all. I wrote about it at the time, wondering if tax paying had become one of
those civic rituals, like waiting for election returns, that has become
privatized. I was worrying for nothing.
Counting Out the Hundreds
When
I arrived a little after 11 a.m., the line was out the door of the tax collector’s
office, extending to the door to the county building itself, nearly a hundred
feet away. It took 40 minutes to get to the window, and when I reached the door
to the office it became obvious what part of the problem was.
Several
of the people ahead of me were paying their property tax in cash. Why anyone
but a drug dealer would do that, I can’t imagine, but even in this county it’s
hard to imagine that there are that many property-owning drug dealers, so I
guess they had their reasons.
In
any event, two payment windows were open, and only one of them accepted cash
payments. People were taking a fistful of hundreds out of an envelope, counting
them out, handing them over, then waiting while the clerk counted the money
again and made change. Tax bills here aren’t rounded up to an even number, so
the clerk had to count out a lot of dollar bills and coins.
Me,
I handed over the bill and a check for the exact amount, got a receipt and was
off the window a minute after I arrived. Then I walked around the corner to the
civil division of superior court, where the line was considerably shorter.
Handwritten Ledgers
For
a historical research project, I was trying to find out how often a local
businessman had been in court between 1921 and 1932, either suing someone or
being sued. I had no idea whether it would be possible to get the information
without a ridiculous amount of going through files, but figured I should ask.
As
it turned out, they had a system for that. For years the county had kept
alphabetical ledgers of all the parties in lawsuits, the names written out in
beautiful cursive. They were on microfiche , and I was able to check out the period
in question in less than an hour.
There
was no big story; he was the defendant in one suit for an unpaid bill (they
were able to retrieve a microfilm of the original filing) of $781. Nothing much
in itself, nor did it appear to be part of a pattern, but it ruled out a
possible angle, and that’s a big part of research as well. The two women at the
desk were extremely pleasant and helpful, and I left feeling that the check I’d
just handed in around the corner was actually paying for something tangible.
Not a bad feeling in the age of The Cloud.
