That’s the message Lakewood Mayor Doug Richardson gave me today after I called about an incident at Monday’s City Council meeting.

It went down like this: The Lakewood City Council adjourned to executive session around 9 p.m., Monday to review the annual performance of City Manager Andrew Neiditz.

With the exception of me and another person, the room cleared as council members walked into a closed meeting room. A custodial crew began cleaning the City Council chambers. A Lakewood police officer also stuck around.

I was chatting with a meeting regular in Lakewood – Ken Severe — when the officer asked us to leave at the request of the custodians. Although we knew the public meeting hadn’t officially ended, we figured it wasn’t a big deal. We walked to the lobby.

Once there, we chatted with another regular meeting attendee – Fredric Cornell. While the three of us spoke, the police officer walked up and asked us to wait outside (in the cold, snowy weather).

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Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer Dale Washam said Thursday he plans to devote as much staff time as possible to addressing a backlog of property inspections that accumulated under his predecessor.

But Washam said it could be years before every property that wasn’t inspected as scheduled gets a visit by a county appraiser.

“If I can complete it in four years, I’ll do it,” Washam said. “If I can complete it in three years, I’ll do it.”

Washam pledged to address the backlog a day after telling the County Council the assessor’s office skipped state-required physical inspections on more than 181,000 residential properties – well over half of properties requiring inspection. He said the office also skipped inspections for tens of thousands of commercial properties.

Documents and interviews with current and former assessor-treasurer employees indicate the office skipped inspections on many properties for at least six years under former Assessor-Treasurer Ken Madsen.

Most years the assessor’s office uses statistical methods to value residential, commercial and industrial property for tax purposes. But state law requires local assessors to physically inspect properties at least once every six years.

The visits allow appraisers to spot significant improvements or deterioration to properties that can affect the assessed value. Skipping the inspections could lead some properties to be undervalued or overvalued. It could also create unequal assessments for similar properties.

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The Puget Sound Regional Council executive board today settled on how to divide $214 million in federal stimulus funds for transit and transportation projects in the region.

The full list is below, but for those who want to know what's in it for us (us being Pierce County), here is the upshot:

Transportation funding:

Transit funding:

Reporter Melissa Santos is covering the meeting and will have more later.

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Former Assessor-Treasurer Ken Madsen this week finds himself trying to explain why his office didn’t conduct – as he puts it – “boots on the ground” inspections for every parcel in Pierce County. But it’s not the first time Madsen has faced such questions.

In 2005, Madsen faced a recall petition filed by Dale Washam, who won election to the assessor’s post last November. In a court hearing on the recall petition, Madsen testified on the issue of whether the office physically inspected properties.

Specifically, Thurston County Superior Court Judge Thomas McPhee asked Madsen about 89, 000 parcels that Washam and others claimed had been falsely reported as physically inspected.

According to a verbatim transcript of the hearing (you can download a copy below), McPhee asked Madsen: “…do you contend that in those reports, that those 89,000 parcels approximately were physically inspected by someone in your office?”

Madsen responded that the number reported was “a combination of physical appraisal – or physical inspection and statistical update or statistical appraisal.”

Madsen explained that the assessor’s office used computer analysis to identify parcels where “we need to put boots on the ground.”

McPhee followed up: “Do I understand your answer to mean that for those approximately 89,000 parcels … that there may have been some of those that were not physically inspected?”

Madsen responded: “I would agree with that.”

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