Board of assessors

“ Incapable and dishonest assessors often work injustice by underestimating the value of some forms of property, and overestimating the value of other forms. In addition, political pressure is brought to bear upon the assessor to cause him to undervalue the property of the township or county as a whole, so that the local unit will bear a relatively small share of the taxes of the state.
The estimates of the local assessors are commonly subject to correction by a county, and sometimes by a state, board of equalization. ”

“ In his petition for rehearing, in that case, counsel for the appellee urged that the objection to the assessment 'chiefly relied upon' was that it was made by the assessor 'in the presence of and under the directions of the board.' There was nothing to prevent the assessor from making out his list in the presence of the county commissioners, or any one else, nor did the record disclose any proper or sufficient evidence that it was made under the directions of the board, for which reason it was not considered a good ground for rehearing. ”

“ When a case is to be tried by a collegial panel composed of people's assessors and judges, the number of people's assessors in the collegial panel shall be not less than one-third of the total number of the persons in the panel. ”

“ There were also acts of the legislative assembly of the District, which very forcibly imply a confirmation of the acts and assessments of the board of which the bill complains. If Congress or the legislative assembly had the power to commit to the board the duty of making the improvements, and to prescribe that the assessments should be made in the manner in which they were made, it had power to ratify the acts which it might have authorized. ”

“ The Secretary of State is required to audit all bills and accounts paid by the State, and, since he is the State’s purchasing agent and acts as a member of nearly every State board he is called upon to perform the double role of not only expending vast sums of State money but of approving and auditing his own bills and accounts. ”

“ Requests by Board.— If the Board requests that an inspector general conduct or refrain from conducting an audit or investigation and the inspector general rejects the request in whole or in part, the inspector general shall, not later than 30 days after rejecting the request, submit a report to the Board, the head of the applicable agency, and the congressional committees of jurisdiction, including the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives. ”

“ The duties of the board may be so divided that under its supervision the directorship of various activities may be assigned to one or more commissioners. Any commissioner may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. A vacancy in the board shall not impair the right of the remaining members of the board to exercise all its powers. The board shall have an official seal, which shall be judicially noticed. ”

“ The remedies proposed in my bill are the following: in order to do away with the practice of appointing officers on recommendations so untrustworthy, and not unfrequently so completely worthless, the bill provides for a civil-service board, whose business it will be to examine the qualifications of candidates for office, with a single eye to their fitness for the performance of official duty and the discharge of public trust; and from the number of those whose fitness has been properly ascertained the appointments shall be made. ”

“ Under the Tot rule, the minimum justification for such a presumption would be general experience that the most insignificant member of a board has power, if she 'does all she can,' to secure board production of documents held by its custodian. Experience not only fails to support this premise; as any one familiar with the loose-jointed structure of nonprofit associations should know, most members or most boards are wholly subordinate to the executive secretary and the chairman. ”

“ The commissioners are generally empowered to conduct the District's business. They have the power to subpoena witnesses and to administer oaths in investigating District affairs, Tenn.Code Ann. § 6-2616 (5) (1955) , and they serve for only nominal compensation. Tenn.Code Ann. § 6-2615 (Supp.1970) . Plainly, commissioners who are beholden to an elected public official for their appointment, and are subject to removal procedures applicable to all public officials, qualify as 'individuals who are responsible to public officials or to the general electorate' within the Board's test. ”

“ The Board or an executive committee of the Board, or a duly constituted panel of the Board, shall have the right, in its discretion to call up for review any case decided by any department or agency board, or by any head of an employing loyalty board or regional loyalty department or agency, even though no appeal has been taken. ”

“ An Assembly, composed in 1965 of 372 members, meets four times a year and is the basic representative body. The delegates are elected from among the craft units within each of the seven districts on the basis of one delegate for each 75 members of a craft. The Assembly in turn elects from its membership an Executive Board on the basis of one board member for each 500 members, augmented by principal officers and by nonvoting business agents, 31 of whom are elected from the seven districts and others who are appointed by the Assembly. ”

“ Membership of the Secretariat, as will be seen elsewhere, does not render residence at the capital obligatory, indeed distinguished provincial governors are often raised to that dignity, only so, however, when vacancies occur. Next in degree to this office, and of far more practical importance, are six boards representing as many departments in the administration. These are the Board of Civil Service; the Board of Finance; the Board of Rites, Obligations, and Observances (including public institutions and state worship) ”

“ It provided for the election of seven directors, and of a president, secretary, and treasurer; and that the directors should elect out of their number one who, with the president and treasurer, should be a prudential committee, and that the committee should be charged with such duties as might be devolved upon it by the board of directors. The defendants and four others were elected directors. ”

“ On or before February one, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, the Commission on Elections, shall, directly or through its authorized provincial representatives, appoint a board of election inspectors and a poll clerk. Two inspectors, one of whom shall be the chairman of the board, and their substitutes, shall be appointed upon the recommendation of the Liberal Nationalist Party; one inspector and his substitute shall be recommended by the Nationalist Party (conservative) and/or political parties coalesced with it in the last national elections ”

“ Commission government was for many years a fad in this country, and it has become discredited, so that of late we have been doing away with commissions and coming to single heads for departments having executive functions and some minor legislative functions, such as park boards, and police boards, and have been trying to concentrate responsibility in that way. In Erie County and throughout New York a commission elected by the people governs our counties. The board of supervisors is a commission government. It has never been creditable—always bad, even as compared with our city governments. ”

“ But the board never meets; the president alone constitutes a quorum, and he conducts the business of the department, with the assistance, in the case of the Board of Trade, of the Local Government Board and the Board of Education, of a secretary who is not himself a member of the board, but is, like the president, capable of sitting in the House of Commons, and occupies, in short, the position of a parliamentary under-secretary. In practice, therefore, these boards are legal phantoms that provide imaginary colleagues for a single responsible minister ”

“ GOVERNMENT WITHOUT A HEAD The long ballot has other results than the mere difficulty of intelligent voting. One of these is a GOVERNMENT WITHOUT A HEAD. While the board of supervisors or commissioners is nominally at the head of the county government, it has to work through the various administrative officers. These are also elected by the people, and may be of the opposite political party. At all events, they are independent of the board, not responsible to it, and may or may not work in harmony with it. ”

“ The executive is farther aided, advised or restrained, as the case may be, by the executive board, which is an additional contrivance of the last adopted charter added to the government of the city to keep the council from going wrong. This executive board composed of ten citizens appointed by the mayor, and over whose deliberations the mayor acts as chairman, divided up into ten committees and to which any business of the council and acts of the council may be directly or indirectly referred for approval and execution. ”

“ The Executive Committee should be small and the members should live near enough each other to be able to have frequent regular meetings, besides special meetings in emergencies. Where the organization is local, such as a society for sustaining an orphan asylum, the Board of Managers usually divides itself into committees having charge of different branches of the work during the intervals between the monthly or quarterly meetings of the Board, when these committees report on the work done. ”

“ The Boards have no power to promulgate regulations, and are not expressly delegated any authority to pass on the validity of regulations or statutes. Such authority cannot readily be inferred, for the composition of the boards, and their administrative procedures, render them wholly unsuitable forums for the adjudication of these matters: local and appeal Boards consist of part-time, uncompensated members, chosen ideally to be representative of the registrants' communities ”

“ It was the legislative intention that the board of commissioners should be the body which should submit the question of subscription and issue of he bonds to popular decision, and they were also deputed to determine the result of the election,-we mean the board as it was constituted at the time when an election might be held. ”

“ Even an appeal from an assessment, if referred to a court and jury, or merely to a court, to be proced ed in according to judicial methods, may become a suit within the act of congress. But the ordinary acts and doings of assessors, or of appellate boards of assessors, in passing upon matters of mere valuation, appraisement, or proportionate distribution of expense, belong to a different class of governmental functions, executive and administrative in their character, and not appertaining to the judicial department. ”

“ At the biennial session following the taking of each decennial census under the authority of Congress, and at such other times as the General Assembly finds necessary, it shall revise the boundaries of the legislative districts and shall make a new apportionment of its membership in order to maintain equality of representation among the respective districts as nearly as is practicable. The General Assembly may provide for establishment of a legislative apportionment board to advise and assist the General Assembly concerning legislative apportionment. ”

“ The civil-service board will therefore not designate the person to be appointed, thus virtually exercising the appointing power, but it will exclude from the list of candidates those who are unfit for appointment. The Senate will have the reports of the board on all the candidates before them, and thereby be enabled to ascertain whether the best choice has been made by the President. ”

“ In large cities there are boards or commissioners, distinct from the council, and these may be composed of salaried officers. In either case the board may employ a superintendent to take charge of the work under its jurisdiction. The principal criticism which can be offered against this method of managing administrative departments is that responsibility cannot be definitely located. No single member of a board or commission will assume responsibility for mismanagement; and when responsibility is divided among several persons, none of them feels it very strongly. ”

“ It should be emphasized, moreover, that in contrast to the strictly appellate functions it exercises in other cases, the Appeal Board in handling conscientious objector claims is the first selective service board to receive the Department's recommendation, and is usually the only decision-making body to pass on the entire file. An opportunity for the registrant to reply is therefore the only means of insuring that this Board will have all of the relevant data. ”

“ He presided regularly at the weekly meetings, and when the executive business came to be done by several committees, he attended them also with the utmost assiduity. On this occasion, as on other occasions in his life, the acceptance of fresh work seemed to have an electric effect on him. After the lapse of seventeen years the operations of the Board are seen by all men to be vast, probably the largest of their kind under any one Board in the world ”

“ Neither does the Board itself serve as an agent of Congress in any case.
The majority never makes up its mind whether its claim is that the Board exercises legislative or executive authority. The Court of Appeals, however, had no doubts, concluding that the Board's authority was "quintessentially executive." ”

“ True lists are required to be furnished to the assessors by the inhabitants of all their polls and estates, both real and personal, not exempted from taxation, and the provision is that in case of neglect the assessors shall ascertain the particulars, as near as possible, and make an estimate thereof at its just value. ”