Jeff Prang - Innovative Recruitment Programs and Virtual Training

The LA County Assessor's office handles $2 trillion in assessed value. Jeff Prang explains how strategic thinking about recruitment, technology, and public trust can transform assessment operations.

Assessment offices across the country face a perfect storm: aging workforces, complex technology transitions, and persistent public misunderstanding of our role. As LA County Assessor Jeff Prang shared in a recent conversation, these challenges demand more than incremental fixes, they require fundamental rethinking of how we operate.

With 1,400 employees managing 2.5 million parcels, Prang's office is the largest of its kind in the nation. Yet the lessons emerging from LA County apply to assessment operations of any size, particularly around building sustainable workforces and implementing technology that actually works.

The Recruitment Revolution

When over half your workforce is within five years of retirement, traditional hiring approaches collapse. Prang inherited exactly this situation in 2014, with his office barely treading water, hiring 30-35 appraisers annually while losing roughly the same number to attrition.

"We had vacancies that remained unfilled for years simply because our ability to hire people wasn't sufficient," Prang explained. Then COVID hit, accelerating retirements just as a ballot measure threatened to require 700 additional commercial appraisers practically overnight.

The solution? Move training out of the assessor's office entirely.

Community Colleges as Force Multipliers

Rather than continue the traditional model of internal training classes limited to 30 people, LA County partnered with local community colleges to create assessment-specific curricula. Students who complete these programs can sit for state certification exams, arriving at the assessor's office job-ready.

"My goal was that they would train people who may aspire to be a government appraiser, a private appraiser, real estate developer, real estate agent, anything dealing with real estate," Prang said.

The benefits cascade:

• Unlimited training capacity (no longer constrained by internal resources)
• Reduced attrition (early dropout happens before hiring, not after)
• No production loss from pulling experienced staff to train
• Creates career pathways for community college students
• Provides measurable job placement success for educational partners

This model now includes three separate programs: traditional appraisers, appraiser assistants (with lower initial requirements), and ownership technicians. Other California assessors are watching closely, hoping to replicate the approach.

Technology That Actually Works

Government technology projects fail so predictably it's almost cliché. Prang pointed to local examples: LA's water department billing system that sent million-dollar bills to residential customers, the school district's payroll system that couldn't pay teachers correctly.

"My charge to our staff when we started this, we cannot go through what these other agencies went through. I'm an elected official; that'll cost me my job."

Agile Over Waterfall

Instead of the traditional "design-bid-build" approach where systems are built in isolation then switched on hoping for the best, LA County used agile development with two-week sprints. Each sprint had to work before moving to the next.

"We ran parallel systems up until August 5th," Prang explained. "When we went live, we had a handful of glitches here and there, but for the most part it went off without a hitch."

The $120 million Oracle-based system replaced 1970s-era mainframe technology and digitized 2.4 million property files. Previously, answering a taxpayer question might require putting them on hold while someone walked to massive file rooms with rolling shelves. Now any employee can access any file from any computer.

Critical success factors:

• End users on the design team from day one
• Short iterative development cycles
• No advancement until current phase works
• Parallel systems to reduce switchover risk
• Political will to fund properly from the start

Building Public Trust Through Transparency

Perhaps the most overlooked challenge facing assessors is basic public understanding. In California, Prang notes, "99.9% of people think I'm the guy who collects your taxes." This confusion means 60% of phone calls to the assessor's office are actually tax collection questions.

But public education goes beyond correcting job titles. LA County recently hired data analysts specifically to mine assessment data for policy-relevant insights. Early findings about equity appreciation in traditionally African American neighborhoods and the rise of corporate ownership provide crucial context for affordable housing discussions.

"We're not policymakers," Prang emphasizes. "We're trying to come up with interesting things that we could share with city councils or the legislature."

This positions the assessor's office as more than a revenue function, it becomes a trusted source of market intelligence for communities grappling with housing affordability, gentrification, and economic development.

The Human Element

Throughout our conversation, Prang returned to a fundamental truth: assessment is a craft requiring human judgment and institutional knowledge. While virtual training allowed them to double class sizes during COVID, something was lost.

"It is a tactile craft," he said. "We are finding that there's things that are simply missing in a virtual environment."

Similarly, while AI and automation offer tremendous potential for mass appraisal, California's Proposition 13 means "each appraisal has to be somewhat unique." Technology enhances human capability rather than replacing it.

Key Takeaways

For Assessment Leadership:

• Workforce challenges require structural solutions, not just better recruiting
• Educational partnerships can transform your talent pipeline
• Technology projects succeed through user involvement and iterative development
• Public trust requires proactive communication and value-added services

For the Profession:

• Our data has value beyond tax rolls, find ways to share insights responsibly
• Invest in your own professional development; seek IAO designations
• Remember that behind every parcel is a taxpayer who deserves fair treatment
• Take pride in enabling every other government service through your work

As Prang reflected: "Nobody gets to do their job until I do mine."

That fundamental truth, that accurate, fair assessment underpins all public services, should drive every decision we make about staffing, technology, and public engagement. The innovations emerging from LA County show that with strategic thinking and political will, even the largest challenges can become opportunities for transformation.