Photo by Torrey Bailey
Matt Strabone
Matt Strabone has a cold, but he’s not letting it get in the way of telling a good dad joke.
“I save all my best material for real life, not Twitter,” Strabone remarks to a potential voter inside a communal meeting room inside a downtown condo complex. A little over a dozen people have gathered to hear Strabone speak about his candidacy and, while he seems nerdy on the surface, one gets the sense that people laugh at his jokes not so much because they think they’re funny, but rather, his aw, shucks demeanor is seemingly untainted and infectious.
The crowd isn’t exactly large, but Strabone addresses them as if he’s speaking to a filled auditorium.
“Now I know what you’re all thinking, and it’s always the first question I get,” Strabone begins telling the crowd before pausing. “What does the San Diego County Assessor-Recorder-Clerk actually do?”
No one raises their hand or disputes his query. He then launches into a well-rehearsed outline of what the office does exactly.
“The answer, my friends, is primarily three things: It assesses how much property tax you pay, it stores the county’s public land records and it issues marriage licenses, as well as birth and death certificates.”
But then Strabone hits them with the real pitch: “But I like to say instead that its real purpose is to support us in some of the most important moments in our lives. When we’re getting married, when we’re having children or when we’re buying a home. I’m running, in essence, to improve how this office supports us.”
A few days later, Strabone, a nonprofit and ethics attorney, admits that much of his now year-long campaign to become the next County Assessor-Recorder-County Clerk [Assessor, moving forward] has been about simply trying to explain just how important the office really is to the day-to-day life of a local.
“It takes up at least half the time when I’m talking to folks,” Strabone says. “And I knew that going in. I knew that very few people even knew that this office even existed, let alone what it does and how it can help them.”
It’s the last part of that statement that Strabone is especially keen on pointing out. He believes it’s what separates him from his opponent, current Assessor Ernest Dronenburg Jr. Whereas most may see a position that is meant to simply assist, Strabone emphasizes the importance of help. That is, it’s one thing to perform a function; it’s another to actually help people understand that function.
Still, he knows that when it comes to getting people to actually care about the functions of that office, it’s not an elected position that most people will bother to research so he has to put it to voters in a way that’s accessible.
“It’s one thing to list out that the office has three primary roles, but people still need you to connect the dots,” Strabone says. “When I go up to folks and tell them that there are 150,000 homeowners in San Diego County who are not getting the property tax exemption that they should be getting and that those people are paying extra money on property tax every year, that gets their attention.”
“Then I get a million questions about the exemption, which is good because that’s what I want. I want them to understand and ask questions. If you make it real for them, then they pay attention and begin to think, ‘oh, this really matters to me.’”
If Assessor Dronenburg’s name sounds familiar to some, Strabone likes to remind them why that might be. Back in 2013, Dronenburg made national headlines when he filed a petition to the California Supreme Court to halt same-sex marriages even after it was essentially the law of the land. He was also in the news more recently when a Union-Tribune story revealed that he had taken more than 100 trips and racked up over $90,000 in travel expenses between 2012 and 2017, all funded by taxpayer dollars.
“For me, if you’re an engaged citizen and you think you could do a better job than the person who’s currently representing you, then you should,” Strabone says. “For me, it was time to step up and do something about this subpar public service.”
Still, even with his opponent’s varying missteps, Strabone may still have an uphill battle. First, he is running against an entrenched incumbent who was reelected handily in 2014. There’s also the matter that Strabone is running in a non-partisan race, which means his party affiliation will not appear next to his name on the June primary ballot. Oh, and that primary, not the November election, will decide the Assessor race so it’s likely there will be fewer voters. Finally, there’s also the matter that Dronenburg has hired a longtime Republican insider, Jordan Marks, as a “Special Assistant.” Or, as Strabone puts it, “he’s essentially making a six-figure government salary to serve as Dronenburg’s campaign manager.”
Strabone does see a silver lining in all of this. He says the fact that Dronenburg felt the need to hire Marks at all is evidence that the Assessor now considers Strabone a viable threat to win the election in June. If he does manage to pull off a victory, he says he will immediately begin to overhaul and update certain functions at the office. For example, Dronenburg returns about $2 million of the Assessor budget every year back to the county. Strabone sees this as a waste and that the $2 million should go toward things like upgrading the office’s software system so that the public can easily access public records. He says that once this is done, it will significantly free up staff time to do more expanded public outreach. He wants to partner with community groups in order to better inform citizens of the functions of the office. Or, rather, how the office can help them.
“Anything I can do to improve customer service and outreach, I will do it,” he tells the people gathered in the condo complex. “I know that this isn’t the most high-profile office in the world, but it does touch the lives of literally every person in the county and that’s why it’s so important to me.”