We recommend voting for Joaquin Torres for Assessor-Recorder. This office assesses more than $350 billion in taxable property and keeps the city's official records.

Though Torres is running unopposed, he has earned the seat on the merits.

Torres inherited an in-progress $55 million replacement of the office's decades-old technology, started under his predecessor Carmen Chu, and carried it to completion. We don't want to diminish Chu's role in that important transition, she deserves all the credit for the hard work getting it rolling, but Torres does deserve the credit for ensuring it completed successfully.

In December 2024 he made San Francisco the first county in California to put its recorded documents online for free, more than 7 million of them going back to 1990, replacing a system that charged residents for copies of their own deeds. He did it while keeping assessments on schedule through the most volatile commercial real estate market in memory and, by his own account, the highest volume of assessment appeals since the Great Recession.