NORTHAMPTON — When Joan Sarafin lost her job in the 1970s, she went to an employment agency. She was matched up with an open position as a junior clerk in the Northampton Assessor’s Office.
“I just thought I’d help my children get through college, and I would leave,” she recalled nearly 50 years later. “But I liked the job, and I was kinda lonesome after they left for college. I just kept going. And going and going,” she said with a laugh.
Few have worked for the city for longer than Sarafin. After a 47-year tenure, she is retiring this week from her position as principal assessor, the city announced.
The assessor’s office determines property values in the city, residential, commercial and industrial. The office also handles abatements and appeals and works with the city and the Massachusetts Department of Revenue to set the city’s tax rate.
“Joan was a consummate professional who cared deeply about her work, and particularly about helping residents understand what can be a very complicated and confusing aspect of municipal finance,” Mayor David Narkewicz said.
After starting as a junior clerk in 1972, in 1979 Sarafin became a Massachusetts Association of Assessing Offices accredited assessor, after several years of classes. “I was kind of proud about that,” she said.
She moved up, and in 1989 she became principal assessor.
Marc Dautreuil, currently the city’s deputy assessor, is set to take Sarafin’s place, pending City Council confirmation, according to the mayor’s office.
“Her favorite aspect of working in the assessor’s department, I think, was getting to help out farmers and the elderly,” Dautreuil said. “I know she would help them with their chapter land paperwork and really go above and beyond,” he said, referring to the paperwork that gives farmers discounts.
Sarafin agreed. “I loved talking with the public. I liked helping the elderly and the farmers. Farmers have a terrible time with book work, and because my husband was a farmer, I knew how difficult it was for them.”
Sarafin worked in city government longer than almost any person before her. Melissa “Lissa” Lampron, for example, worked for the city for 48 years, retiring in 2015 from her job as tax collector.
A lot has changed in the assessors’ office during Sarafin’s long career. When she started, “the principal clerk at that time had an adding machine that you had to crank after you put the numbers in. Sometimes it would repeat, and she would have to start over,” she recalled. “We’ve come a long long way.”
She’s also seen property values change significantly.
“Because property sells for so much more these days and it continues to go up,” she said. “People are coming here from other communities or other states.”
It’s been a trend since well before the arrival of the pandemic. “They will come from California and have sold a house for a few million dollars,” Sarafin said. “That causes values to rise because they’ve sold something so expensive they can come here and get in a little bidding war and push the pricing up. That affects the whole neighborhood.”
Residential property value is calculated by looking at similar sales in the same neighborhood, Sarafin explained.
“I never thought I would live long enough to see a house sell for a million dollars,” she said of Northampton. “Now almost every month there’s something like that.”
When values increase, sometimes homeowners will get upset, she said.
“They don’t understand. They’ll say, ‘I haven’t done anything to the house, why is the value going up?’ They don’t understand that the houses that have sold in the neighborhood have pushed the value up. That’s the state law.”
She aims to be fair. “You can never do it perfectly, but you try to do it as fair as you can.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.