SILVAR breakfast meeting. Larry Stone #1 of 3
SILVAR breakfast meeting. Larry Stone Assessor to lower values of 26000 properties By Rose Meily For the Los Gatos Weekly-Times Article Launched: 04/02/2008 05:51:14 PM PDT Home sales may be down in the county, and in some areas home values have dropped due to the subprime loan situation and resulting foreclosures, but the problem is not as serious in Silicon Valley as in other parts of the county, Santa Clara County’s assessor Larry Stone told members of the Silicon Valley Association of Realtors at a recent meeting. This year, in light of the problems besetting the housing market and in accordance with Proposition 8, the Santa Clara County assessor’s department is going to lower the values of about 26000 properties in order to reflect the lower market value. He said the same situation happened when the economy was down in 1995, but at that time, the county assessor placed 98000 properties in Proposition 8 status. Proposition 8 requires the county assessor to take into account any factors causing a decline in value of a property, and consequently reduce a property’s value. The reductions are temporary and recognize the current market value of a property has fallen below its current factored Proposition 13 base year value. When and if the market value of the previously reduced assessment (Proposition 
increases above its Proposition 13 factored base year value, the assessor will once again enroll its Proposition 13 factored base year value. Stone said he closed Santa …
William K. Black, the former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board who investigated the Savings and Loan disaster of the 1980s, discusses the latest scandal in which a single bank, IndyMac, lost more money than was lost during the entire Savings and Loan crisis. He will examine the political failure behind this economic disaster, in which not only massive fraud has taken place, but a vast transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class continues as the federal government bails out the seemingly reckless, if not the criminal. Black teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.