Outside the box: Cameron County recognized for innovation
Aug. 3—Innovative changes by the Cameron County Tax Assessor-Collector's office in response to the pandemic have earned the county honors in the form of a 2022 National Achievement Award from the National Association of Counties.
The award was in recognition of the tax office's success in fully consolidating the county's tax-collection system and substantially expanding the availability of drive-through lanes for taxpayers, both innovations forced by COVID-related closures of tax-collection offices.
Tony Yzaguirre Jr., the county's tax assessor-collector, said all offices in county government, utility companies and everything else were shuttered in 2020 when the pandemic struck. At the time, the county had just six drive-through lanes in Brownsville, on east Levee Street and formerly owned by Wells Fargo, plus one in Harlingen and a Los Fresnos office, he said.
"We noticed that county revenues were down so we started to look for ways to improvise or adapt to this problem," Yzaguirre said. "We looked for abandoned banks with drive-through lanes. We found Capital One."
The county acquired former Capital One drive-through facilities in San Benito and Harlingen, he said. The Harlingen location, at 300 E. Van Buren Ave., held its grand opening on July 28. The county also added another drive-through lane to its Harlingen office on Wilson Road, plus additional lanes in Los Fresnos and Port Isabel, Yzaguirre said.
The assessor's office does the collecting for more than 50 taxing jurisdictions within the county, but before the pandemic was missing four: The city of Harlingen and Harlingen Independent School District, Los Fresnos ISD and Rio Hondo ISD all were using a private company for tax collections, and the only office was in Harlingen. When the pandemic struck, the company closed its lobby and shut down its business, Yzaguirre said.
"We offered our services at the same time we were constructing and obtaining drive-through lanes," he said. "This all happened at the same time."
Yzaguirre said the county got a great deal on the former Capital One properties since there's not a lot of demand for that type of real estate.
"We bought the buildings and we brought in those four entities that we were lacking to make our tax collection 100 percent," he said. "We're one of the very few in the state of Texas that has a 100 percent consolidated tax office. That means that we collect for everybody now. Every taxing jurisdiction that's out there, every school district, every town, every city. We were able to bring everybody on board."
Now a taxpayer who lives anywhere in the county can pay their property taxes at any of the locations countywide, Yzaguirre said. In addition to paying property taxes, county residents can renew their vehicle registration at any of the sites, he said.
In addition, the assessor's office renegotiated its contract with the county's depository band, Lone National Bank, so that property taxes can also be paid, and vehicle registrations renewed, via the bank's drive-through lanes, Yzaguirre said.
"That went over real well," he said. "The first 30 days Lone Star started collecting for us ... $1.3 million were collected at the drive-through windows in property taxes."
It's not necessary to bank with LNB to use their drive-throughs to conduct county business, Yzaguirre said, adding that his office has just begun training LNB employees to handle the registration renewals.
"Of course by law they have to be bonded," he said. "I'm going from bank to bank now, to swear these employees in. They become an agent of the county, and we're an agent of the state of Texas, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles."
The changes have been very popular with the public and are "here to stay," even if it took a pandemic to bring them about, Yzaguirre said.
"COVID just threw a monkey wrench into the whole system," he said. "We just had to think outside the box. ... When the association found out we were doing all this, they liked the idea. That's what constituted the achievement award."
