Paul Bass Photo
As angry hordes loom on the horizon, the new face of New Haven’s tax office has a response: We understand. Maybe we can help.
That new face belongs to 28-year-old Beaver Hills native Alexzander Pullen (pictured).
“It takes a lot to rile me up,” Pullen said. He’s about to be put to the test.
Just as New Haven begins a grueling once-a-decade full citywide property revaluation — with all the confusion, anger, protests, and extra number-crunching that traditionally accompany it — Pullen is stepping into the role of “acting tax assessor.” He’s the person leading the seven-person office in charge of setting a $5.1 billion (as of 2010) grand list of real estate, motor vehicle, and personal property. It’s the office that directly confronts city taxpayers irate or seeking more information about their new property assessments — aka Pressure Cooker Central at City Hall in months to come.
Pullen steps into the role after the departure of an assessor who had the city up in arms, lawmakers holding hearings, the DeStefano administration scrambling to promise reforms to modernize the office and make it putatively customer-friendly.
Pullen is all about customer-friendly.
“Obviously every assessor is going to have a different style,” Pullen said in an interview in his first-floor office at City Hall. “I come from the people. I strongly believe in customer service. We’re either the first or second face people see in City Hall.
Growing up, he said, he had practice staying calm in challenging new roles and defusing potential conflict.
He got that practice at the elite Choate Rosemary Hall prep school in Wallingford.
Pullen was one of 13 low-income students from across the country to get a full scholarship to Choate offered by corporate raider Carl Icahn one year. He had previously gone to school with pretty much the same kids from kindergarten through eighth grade at West Hills.
“It was scary” at first, he recalled. “I hadn’t been out of New Haven except my grandmother’s house, which I now own, in North Haven.
“I’m in a strange environment [at Choate]. I’m a charity case. It’s a whole different world up there; I went to school with Ivanka Trump.” (“She’s a nice girl,” Pullen added, when asked.)
It was culture shock. Privileged white kids would ask him “why black people do this” or that. They’d ask him awkward questions about his hair.
Pullen came to “realize people aren’t trying to be racist. People’s aren’t trying to be nasty and mean. They just don’t understand. … [I came to] understand that not everybody’s background is the same. It wasn’t that they looked down at my upbringing. They didn’t understand it. When you explained it, socioeconomic barriers aside, everybody was the same.”
Working in the assessor’s office for the past decade, Pullen has come to a similar conclusion about citizens who seem bent out of shape. Some start yelling. Some bang on the counter.
“People don’t come in here with bad attitudes because of something we did so much as they don’t understand they process and they want to hold someone accountable,” he said. “Usually when you talk to people nice and calm and explain the situation, you can calm them down.”
Pullen began his new gig this past week. He said he told his staff to “do everything you can for the taxpayer. Not to say break the rules. Just go the extra mile. The taxpayers are tired. They’ve been running around getting documents. We’re open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Lord knows we don’t want them to have to take another day off.”
He offered an example of how the staff can “go the extra mile.” Taxpayers need to bring in a receipt on official letterhead when they junk a car. Sometimes they come in with the official letterhead, or with documents missing key information. Rather than sending them back to the junkyard, the staff can call the junkyard and ask for a proper document to be faxed. Save a trip.
The same with motor vehicle records. Sometimes after visiting the Bureaucratic Black Hole — er, state Department of Motor Vehicles — taxpayers can end up with documents that are missing information. The city can work with the DMV to get the information and save a taxpayer a bus trip, Pullen said. “So they don’t have to go [back] down there when they just said they have no money.”
Pullen began working in the office in 2001 as an intern. After his graduation from University of Pennsylvania (he turned down Yale so that he could see another city, he said, but he wanted to come back home afterwards), he earned an MBA and a master’s degree in management at Albertus Magnus while rising through the ranks at the assessor’s office. He would translate for Spanish-speaking visitors to the office; he saw that he liked the public-service aspect of the job. After the city promised to assess personal property more thoroughly, he was the staffer in charge of making the changes. Most recently he was promoted to deputy assessor before Mayor John DeStefano asked him to serve in the “acting” top position. Meanwhile, the city is conducting a national search for a permanent assessor.
Pullen said he’s not sure whether he’ll apply for that permanent position. He’s focused on finishing the new real estate grand list (New Haven has about 27,300 land parcels), working with taxpayers who bring potential discrepancies to the office, while also undertaking the 2012 personal property and motor vehicle reassessments.
All with a smile and consummate calm, of course.
“I don’t want to let the city down,” he said. “We have a lot of work that has to get done. Somebody’s got to do it.”
Previous coverage of the revaluation:
• Oops: City Will Mail Clearer Reval Notices
• Reval Show Hits The Road
• Will Your Taxes Go Up?
• East Rock Braces For Reval Sticker Shock