Fresno County Supervisors, Recorder Hire Lawyers Over Real Estate Fee Dispute

Paul Dictos, Fresno County's assessor-recorder, hired attorney Patience Milrod after the Board of Supervisors threatened to sue him over a state housing fee that has already cost at least one landowner $10,000 at closing and generated $35 million for the county since 2018.

The dispute turns on Senate Bill 2, the 2017 Building Homes and Jobs Act, which imposes a $75 recording fee on real estate transactions to fund affordable housing, capped at $225. Most California county recorders apply that ceiling to the entire transaction. Dictos applies the $75 charge to each individual parcel and resets the $225 cap per parcel, a reading that can push fees on multi-parcel land deals into the tens of thousands of dollars.

The standoff escalated in late March when supervisors unanimously directed County Counsel Doug Sloan to send Dictos a demand letter, a step triggered by the Board's approval of a roughly $10,000 refund to a client of Bakersfield attorney Jean Pledger. Pledger flagged the unusually large assessment to Dictos in 2025, telling him she had never encountered fees that high elsewhere in California, and filed a formal claim in 2026 to recover the money.

On April 2, Milrod responded with a letter to Sloan arguing that Dictos' reading of SB 2 is "legally defensible" and squarely within the discretion voters granted him as an elected official. Her letter challenged the Board's motives directly: "When the county threatens litigation to open a statutory loophole that would result in feeding developers' profits at public expense, the public must inquire 'for whose benefit is the county spending our taxpayer dollars to prosecute our county recorder?'"

Who covers Dictos' legal bills is itself unresolved. The county says it is not responsible for his attorney fees since any suit would target him in his official capacity, a configuration county officials acknowledged they have never before encountered. Those costs, on both sides of the v., would ultimately land on county taxpayers.

If a lawsuit is filed, it could define how all 58 California counties collect SB 2 fees, a question Attorney General Rob Bonta and State Controller Malia Cohen have so far declined to answer despite repeated requests from recorders across the state.