RE-ELECT dAN lINDGREN
aSSESSOR
mY fAMILY
My wife Michelle and I have been happily married for 28 years. We got together our junior year in high school and together we've raised two wonderful daughters.
Our oldest daughter, Desiree, is a local real estate agent with Windermere in Aberdeen, and our youngest daughter, Faith, works for Grays Harbor Title. Seeing both of them build careers that help families buy, sell, and protect one of their biggest investments has been incredibly rewarding for me as a father. I also love that we get to talk shop all the time because our careers are all so closely connected.
I was raised by a single mother. Like many families, we faced challenges growing up, and we moved frequently throughout the county. During those years I called Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Elma, Malone, Montesano, and Satsop home.
Looking back, I'm grateful for those experiences. Living in so many different communities in Grays Harbor gave me a unique view of the different people, neighborhoods, and family values that make Grays Harbor County special. I learned the importance of hard work to accomplish your goals, perseverance, and helping people in your community—values that continue to guide me.
Family has always been at the center of my life. Whether we're surfing, hiking, riding jet skis, attending concerts, watching a movie, participating in a local event or simply spending time together, we just enjoy being together.
Experienced Leadership. Local Roots. A Commitment to Serving Grays Harbor County.
My story
In 2007, I began my career in the Grays Harbor County Assessor's Office as a Residential Appraiser. During those early years, I personally completed more than 14,000 property appraisals, gaining firsthand knowledge of nearly every corner of our county and building relationships with property owners throughout Grays Harbor. As a senior appraiser I also trained many of the staff both past and present.
In 2014, the voters of Grays Harbor County entrusted me with the privilege of serving as County Assessor, and I took office on January 1, 2015. Since then, my focus has been to provide fair and accurate assessments, rebuild trust in the Assessors Office, continually modernize our systems, Provide resources for the public to access our data and our maps and deliver the highest level of customer service possible. Myself and my team at the Assessor’s Office have done that. Public trust has improved dramatically in the Assessor’s Office since I have been at the helm. We have a well respected Office with Competent, well trained appraisers, Mappers and administrative staff.
The first thing I did after being elected was an update to our phone system. I wanted there to be a live person answering the phone and not an auto attendant. I felt we could answer the phones with a live person pretty easily considering we have 17 employees and at any given time, even if the appraisers were out in the field we would still always have at least 6 people in the office. I worked with our IT Manger at the time to set the phone tree up to ring our front office staff phones for two rings and if they were already with customers and unable to answer by the 2nd ring, the 3rd ring would light up every phone in the office. This has been in place since two weeks after I was elected back in 2015. You will get a live person 100% of the time when you call the Grays Harbor County Assessor’s office during business hours because customer service is very important to me. I tell my staff all the time that there is nothing going on in our office that is more important than a person calling the office or a person coming to our front counter. We work for them and it’s our responsibility to give them the best customer service we can.
We currently operate on a good system (T2) that I procured when I first took office in 2015. Our old system was inadequate for mass appraisal and administrative efficiency prior to my election. My campaign promise to the voters when I won the election and took the office over in 2015 was to replace our prior system because it could not handle the added work load that was a result of new legislation that went in to effect in 2014. That new law required Assessors offices to appraise every property in the county, every year. We had only appraised one fourth of the county each year previously and that’s all our old system was designed to do. The new requirements meant that we had to go from appraising about 16,000 Parcels per year to appraising 64,000 properties per year. We needed to go to a new system in order to handle this change. I had a 50 page Request for Proposals out to system vendors within two weeks of taking office. We had two vendors respond. Those two companies were the only two available for a county our size at the time. We did extensive demos of both programs. I negotiated favorable pricing, strategically pitting both companies against each other to get teh best pricing we could get and we purchased the lesser expensive of the two options because I believed it to be a good system for Grays Harbor. I really liked it’s data mining capabilities. To buy the same system today would cost 5 times what we paid. Going thru a conversion to a new property tax and appraisal system is not easy. It’s a lot of important data. It’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of training, testing, learning and problem solving for myself and for my staff and we still had to get our normal work done. Even with all of that our conversion went pretty smoothly and I was involved in every step of the conversion process for well over a year to ensure we would be successful. Fast forward to today, the system is stable and we have been using it successfully for nearly a decade. It’s a great system and I’m happy with the decision we made to put this new system in place. I am constantly pushing for improvements in our processes and how we serve the public.
Another project I worked on was creating a streamlined process at the county for selling tax title property held in trust by the county. There were over 300 properties off of the tax rolls just sitting and they were all a liability to the county. The county had no good use for them. There had not been a surplus property sale at the county for decades. These were all properties that didn’t sell at the tax sale in previous years. I spearheaded the project after talking with our Tax title manager at the time Claudia Self. Claudia told me how she had to pay to mow these properties, clean them up when people dumped things on them and even pick up needles on some of them. This had driven her crazy and she could not get an elected official to help solve the issue. I told her I would help. We went to work and got Commissioner Vickie Raines involved as well as Jennifer Weiland from our county legal department, our Treasurer at the time, Ken Albert and our county tax title manager Claudia. We had some meetings to go over the issue and began structuring an efficient process to get these properties legally sold and back on the tax rolls. The process we created is still in place today and we have sold nearly all of the surplus properties that we had. The surplus property process we created has been extremely successful. The effect of getting those properties back on the tax roll was that it lowered property taxes for the rest of the tax payers. That felt good and it is a rare thing to be able to accomplish something that has so many positive results.
Something else that I think is really important for any elected official is to advocate for your constituents at the legislature. Our state legislators have a lot of respect for local elected officials. When local electeds speak up on laws that affect their work and constituents, the legislators generally listen. I was unanimously elected by my fellow Washington Assessors to serve on the executive board for WACO as the Assessor’s Liaison where help direct the priorities and yearly plans for our lobbyists. I serve on the Legislative committee for WSACA as well. In this committee made up of a number of assessors and our WACO Executive director, we monitor all property tax related bills that are proposed and we provide feedback to lawmakers. In addition to monitoring proposed legislation, we also create new legislation to correct or improve property tax laws. We find sponsors, we testify at hearings and we lobby legislators to introduce and support our bills. A bill we spearheaded that recently was signed into law in March of 2026 was SB 6162 We created this bill based on the feedback we were all getting from our constituents. The senior/disabled low fixed income property owners were having a difficult time keeping up with rising costs including property taxes and they needed help. They were literally crying to me on the phone regularly. They weren’t upset about their value or about paying taxes. They just didn’t want to lose their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay their property taxes. When you are on a low fixed income and costs continually rise, it’s squeezes the already low fixed income population financially to the breaking point. We listened and we took action. We got SB 6162 passed into law. All current senior exemption program participants will see a large drop in their property taxes and many more that did not qualify before will now qualify starting in 2027. This is real, meaningful property tax releif, not just a small token amount. The low fixed income Senior and disabled population will see big changes to their tax bills starting in 2027 and some will now pay little or no property tax.
In 2024, I made the decision to update and upgrade our public facing mapping site. Our old program Mapsifter was good for us for a long time and served us well but the company wasn’t updating it anymore and it was getting out dated. I have extensive training, knowledge and experience in GIS and Assessor mapping. I felt I had the knowledge of our GIS mapping tools and how it all worked and I could probably build a pretty robust mapping website if I partnered with the right website vendor. I decided a custom build that we could have more control over was our best option. I interviewed and researched a few GIS based website venders and decided to partner with the Sanborn mapping company. Their site structure could handle everything I wanted it to do. Sanborn is one of the longest operating mapping companies in the country and had a team of GIS and mapping experts that I felt could really build what we were looking for. I spent about 3.5 months with our GIS manager Tim Triesch going back and forth with Sanborn, building the site and adding a ton of maps, layers and GIS features. It was the first mapping site of it’s kind in the state of Washington. Other counties have now started switching over to our same Map Geo platform as well because it is so fast, stable and customizable and it can be updated at will rather than once a month like Mapsifter. It’s been a great, positive partnership in every way and i’m pretty proud of what we were able to accomplish in just a few months. I did this project without help from other Assessor’s Office staff because I did not want to take them from their work. Map Geo also costs the county less money to maintain than our old Mapsifter site.
One thing that I have also been working for a while is getting away from using paper and clip boards for my field appraisal staff. In 2026 we went live with the Data Cloud Solutions field device program (Ipads) that sync data automatically back to our Appraisal system which will minimize data input back at the office making our inspection process much more efficient. We are live and in the testing phase with the field devices now and working with the company to dial them in functionally to our system and processes.
Looking forward, I plan to continue to improve the office. A future project is that I’m actively working on is upgrading our statistical valuation models. We do a great job on our valuations with the current system, in fact our Assessment to Value Ratio from our annual DOR market value ratio audit for 2025 was about 96%. I just think our current process is too cumbersome and time consuming. There a lot of good options and some that are little to no cost to the county which I will factor in to my decision.
All of these things are just a few highlights from my time as your elected Assessor. I love real estate. The Assessor’s office is in my blood at this point. There is no one that knows and understands the Grays Harbor County Assessor’s office better than I do. I’ve got the skills, knowledge, ability and drive to continue to be a good Assessor and represent you as voters.
Serving as your County Assessor has been one of the greatest honors of my life. Please vote to re-elect Dan Lindgren for Grays Harbor County Assessor.
"I've lived in communities all across Grays Harbor County, worked throughout the county, and now have the privilege of serving the entire county. It would be my honor to continue the good work we have started in the Assessor’s Office. I ask for your vote for my Re-Election.”
