The process to establish charges, fees and assessments on the annual tax roll are outlined below.

The Controller's Office will accept and process input information beginning on, or prior to, July 1st and continues through the end of the month. You must submit transmittal information with your data, which includes the following:

  • Special District assessment name
  • Assessment/charge code (3 characters)
  • Assessment amount, by parcel (must be equally divisible by 2)
  • Sum of charges for all assessments
  • Highest and lowest parcel assessment amounts
  • Total number of parcels
  • Name, telephone, email, and mailing address of the responsible contact person (for submitting required data) in your organization
  • Current telephone number for property tax payers to call if they have questions specific to your assessment

No special charge/assessment/tax will be added to the tax roll unless the following requirements have been submitted to the Controller's Office:

  • A signed Compensation Agreement with the County. This is required to be submitted only once (not each year). Each agency must sign a separate agreement for special assessment, special tax or special charge, as the case may be.

Contact Nathan Gee at (650) 599-1141 or ngee@smcgov.org.

Note to the Taxing Agency: Fill out the name of your agency and Section 8 on the agreement, obtain your Board's authorization/signature on the agreement and send a signed original copy or copies (if you require an original for your file) to the Controller's Office.

  • Resolution passed by agency's Board authorizing the assessment/charges and their collection for the current tax year (resolution must specify assessment amount and statutory authority for assessment)
  • For new assessments and charges, a copy of the legal authority and supporting documentation and reports

Proof lists will be sent to you for your review and sign off. Your sign off means that you have verified the accuracy of your data that will appear on the property tax bills. Your charges/assessments will not be included without your sign off.

Every possible effort will be made to expedite the data input correction process and to obtain a clean file of your information. We will continue to provide the same level of service, subject to these requirements:

  • Data must be received between July 1st and July 31st
  • Your agency must expedite review, corrections and sign off
  • No corrections will be made after August 10th
Email Instructions

Data being submitted as an email attachment should be addressed to: CtlTaxSpecials@smcgov.org.  The e-mail subject line should read "Special Assessments"

Contact

Please direct all Special Assessment questions to Nathan Gee at (650) 599-1141.

To Obtain a List of Valid Parcel Numbers

The Assessor's Office of San Mateo County maintains a current list of valid property parcel numbers. Please contact secured-support@smcacre.org to find out how to obtain lists of parcels or other information made available by the Assessor's Office.

Special Assessments Data Format Requirements

  1. The special assessment data MUST be submitted in ASCII text format and should not have any data delimiters (including spaces and tabs), periods, commas, decimal points, headers or footers. An ASCII text formatted file can be produced using a simple text editor such as Microsoft Notepad or Wordpad.
     
  2. The data must be submitted to the Controller's Office via e-mail.
     
  3. Each record should be 80 characters long and be formatted as shown below:
Data Name Length Position
CHARGE TYPE 1 character 1
CHARGE CODE 3 characters 2-4
PARCEL ID 9 characters 5-13
CHARGE AMOUNT (must be divisible by 2) 8 numeric (2 decimals) 14-21
FILLER 59 blank characters 22-80
  1. A sample of properly formatted data is shown below

6F3302254015700055500
6F3302254015800055500

In the first line of the above example the charge type is 6, charge code is F33, parcel number is 022-540-157, and the charge amount is $555.00. The remainder of the line is padded with spaces

  1. Files with improperly formatted data will be returned to sending Agency for correction.
     
  2. The following information must be included in the e-mail:
  • Special District assessment name
  • Assessment/charge code (3 characters)
  • Dollar total for assessment
  • Highest and lowest parcel assessment amounts
  • Total number of parcels
  • Name, telephone, email, and mailing address of the responsible contact person in your organization
  • Current telephone number for property tax payers to call if they have questions specific to your assessment
  • Date created
  1. Submitting corrected data: After submitting your initial data, proof lists will be provided for your review. If necessary, make corrections to your data and then resubmit the entire file with ALL parcels. Do NOT send partial data that contains just the corrected parcels, unless specifically instructed by Controller's Office.