Long-serving Wasco County employee retires

She was first hired to be a clerk.

Her crisp penmanship was a welcome relief. “The lady I was taking over for, she wrote like a child who was just learning to write. Or like a doctor,” she said.

It was so long ago there were no computers. “Everything was done by hand,” she said. “Carbon paper, typewriters. The younger kids who started working in our office would say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s a typewriter.’”

The assessor’s office establishes the real market value, or worth, of property. The real market value has bearing on its taxable value, or what property owners pay in property taxes.

“What we do is detailed, and when you’re dealing with people’s money, you want to be as accurate as possible,” she said.

Brown started working at the courthouse at the height of the Rajneesh era, when followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh moved into the Big Muddy Ranch in South Wasco County and quickly became a legal, political and criminal nightmare.

Rajneeshees wore brightly colored clothes in hues of orange, red and purple. Once, a Rajneeshee came into the assessor’s office and complimented Brown on her purple dress.

“I went home and burned it because I didn’t want to be affiliated with them. Some of them were pretty nice but some of them were scary,” Brown said.

At one point during that era, a bomb threat was phoned in to the assessor’s office. County officials suspected it potentially came from a phone in a publicly-accessible vault in the clerk’s office, so the whole courthouse was evacuated across the street, but the assessor’s office employees had to stay put.

“Everyone was across the street, and we were the only ones left in the courthouse. I still remember because we were panicking,” she said. “Interesting times.”

Another time, a person suggested on a local radio show that people should go down to the assessor’s office “and do them all in,” Brown recounted.

The very next day, a man came to the front counter, where Brown worked, and plonked a gun on the counter. “Totally freaked me out because of what was on the radio the day before,” she said.

She excused herself and called deputies, who quickly responded. The befuddled man said, “What did I do?” It turned out “he was there to register his gun, but you don’t go into a building and slap a gun on the counter.”

That event “freaked me out, freaked him out. Nothing fazes me with people anymore. Seen it all, heard it all,” Brown said.

When she first started the job, she didn’t think she was going to make it through her six-month probation period. “I was the first person people would see, I was the first person people would talk to on the phone.”

It took her a long time to reach a point of being able to handle the public frustration thrown her way. She used to ramp up right along with the people who were spewing invectives at her.

“It took me awhile to realize they weren’t attacking me, it’s just where I work,” she said. “I used to take things so personal, and it’s not. I’m so laid back now, I don’t let anything bother me.”

She’s seen tears, family squabbles — she’s seen a son mislead his mother into deeding her house to him — and irate people cussing.

She does credit a Wasco County initiative, called 100% Love, with changing public interactions for the better. “When we changed our attitude toward the customer, it changed theirs,” she said. “If you talk to a person in a calm, nice manner, they can’t be mad at you, it diffuses the situation.”

In December 2000, Brown became an appraiser.

She’s used to people demeaning her job as a public face of local government, especially one related to property taxes.

But the worst time was when a woman in South Wasco County degraded her personally. “She told me I was very dishonest, very evasive, didn’t know what I was doing. That threw my whole day off. I got in my vehicle, drove down the road and just sat there,” she said.

But others have invited her in for coffee.

The funniest one was when a husband got so mad at her that “he just went off.” He wasn’t even mad at her office, it was another county office.

“His wife must’ve given him a real tongue lashing after I left because he called me the next day at the office and apologized. I said, ‘You have nothing to apologize for, you were just venting.’” But he finally said, “Please accept my apology, if you don’t, my wife is gonna be mad at me.”

Three years ago, she was made chief appraiser.

She’s driven all over the county and seen housing market crashes when the local aluminum plant closed. “People owed more than what their property was worth. It was a nightmare,” she said.

“There’s some kind of sketchy areas in Wasco County, that now we go to in pairs, which is so much nicer,” she said. She’s seen pot bellied pigs, snakes, and growling dogs. On one extra sketchy property, “I was waiting for some hillbilly to come out with a gun and point it at my face. I’ve always gone with my gut instinct, if something doesn’t feel right, I get the heck out of there. I used to hear horror stories from past appraisers that are no longer there.”

She started appraising before there was GPS. They just had maps. The way the tax calendar works, they have to do a lot of field appraisals in winter. One snowy winter, she couldn’t drive up the hills in Maupin, “so I’d hike up and slide down.”

And while she wishes she could help people more, she can’t go beyond what the law allows. She saves her desire to help people for her community endeavors, of which she has many.

She was active in the former The Dalles Theater Co., doing everything from acting to being on the board to baking for events. The board also brought Missoula Children’s Theater to The Dalles.

“That was my baby. I loved being around kids,” she said.

She was also on the Big Brother/Big Sister board, and “adopted” her own little sister. “But I adopted her whole family.”

She’s also on her church’s council and is on the Mid-Columbia Community Concert Association board, which hosts the upcoming Dancing with The Gorge Stars event (which takes place Jan. 10 at The Dalles High School).

She plans to take January off, but then she’s planning on helping the community again by volunteering at the Mid-Columbia Senior Center during tax season.

Brown will be sad to retire. “I love the job, I love the people, it’s gonna be different. I’m gonna have to wean myself away.”