Yokum has served in Randolph assessor’s office for 40 years
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ELKINS -- For the past 40 years, Phyllis Yokum has been a devoted employee to the citizens of Randolph County as an employee in the assessor's office.
Yokum, who started as a clerk and mapper back in the early 1980s, worked her way up the ladder before eventually becoming the county's assessor in 2005, a position she still holds.
"When I started in the assessor's office everything was done by hand," Yokum said. "We typed the land books and personal property books by hand, and it was a five-carbon copy, so if you made a mistake you had to go back and arrange five carbon copies. We didn't have any computers and there were just four of us in the office."
Yokum was first hired by former assessor Sherman Stalnaker and shared the office with two other employees, Fred Channell and Linda Coffman. She said a big change came not long after she started when the state requested that all assessors' offices convert to computer usage and data storage.
"The state said we had to go to computers and that was quite the ordeal," she said. "Everything had to be transferred from the paper copies to the computer. And back then it was a dummy terminal, it wasn't an actual computer.
"Of course, we were told that everything was going to be easier with the computers and that there would be less paperwork. But that ended up not being true because there was twice as much paperwork for us to do."
The role of a county assessor is to determine the value of properties. The public official is also known as county appraiser in some states.
"The main job as assessor is to place a fair market value on all property that is taxed," Yokum said. "It's all your real estate and houses, and then on the personal property side, it's all your vehicles. For businesses it's machinery and equipment and those types of things.
"We mail assessment sheets to people and they report what they have. We then place a value on it and it's put into the system, and that's the information that shows up on tax tickets."
Other responsibilities that are carried out in the assessor's office include the management of tax maps, which is what appraisers use to go out and make sure they are at the correct property when they perform an reappraisal. The office also handles the sale of dog tags, deed transfers and the collection of farm applications for people who farm their property.
The number of employees in the assessor's office has grown from single digits when Yokum first started to 11 total employees in 2022.
"Things have grown as we have gone through the years and it just takes more people to keep it going," Yokum noted. "I have very good employees, I really do. They all know their job very well and most of them are long-term employees. They make our office work very efficiently and they're all hard workers."
Although things have grown over the years, Yokum said she expects some of her employees to retire in the near future. As far as her calling it quits, she said she doesn't see herself going anywhere anytime soon.
"I like my job and I always have," Yokum said. "I enjoy my employees because they are more like friends than employees. They make my job easier and as long as things are going well, I don't have any intention of retiring anytime soon."
The Randolph County assessor is elected for a four-year term and has a base salary of $55,979.