George Sodders
SPRINGFIELD – “Wall Street versus Main Street.” That’s how incumbent Clark County Auditor George Sodders is framing his re-election bid this year against a former bank executive.
Republican challenger John Federer sees it a little differently: a longtime incumbent with a history of lax ethics and incompetence versus a political outsider.
Sodders is running on his record, which stretches back to 1991, and he says includes modernizing the auditor’s office.
“When I walked in there were no personal computers,” he said. “I think there might have been one electric typewriter.”
Now the office has property records, a dog-tag database and other information on its website. “That has enabled us to make the office a lot more transparent to citizens,” he said.
But that record also includes a property value reappraisal in 2007 that led to a record 2,836 appeals at the county Board of Revision, followed by thousands of adjustments detractors worry have thrown the whole system off kilter.
“I want to make sure we have fair and accurate real estate values so you don’t pay any more taxes than you have to, and I want to eliminate the waste of taxpayer dollars going through the auditor’s office,” Federer said.
The problem with the 2007 appraisal, Sodders counters, is that Ohio’s system was not built to capture property values declining as they did. And all those adjustments were necessary, he added, to keep taxable values comparable to plummeting sale values even more than the law requires. “I believe that those 95 percent of parcels that were not appealed, I believe the owners of those properties believed those values were fair values,” he said.
Federer and Sodders say the county should save money by bringing the property appraisal function in-house, instead of paying multimillion dollar contracts for it.
Sodders says he is on track to do that by 2013, possibly saving the county $500,000. Federer says the consultant who is helping Sodders set that up is overpaid and has too few performance measures in his contract.
Federer is also a critic of Sodders’ practice of driving a county car to Wright State University, sometimes several times a week, to teach a class for which he is paid. Sodders counters that the class fulfills a continuing education requirement under state law.
Sodders takes aim at Federer’s bank experience, saying as a fired president of Springfield’s National City Bank he worked for a company that helped cause the housing crisis. Federer counters that he wasn’t fired and that his job was eliminated because the bank was bought out. He added he worked for the bank, not the mortgage company.
So the campaigns are a battle of accolades versus accusations in the runup to Nov. 2.
About the Author
