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The El Dorado Hills Community Services District Board of Directors last week unanimously called for an overhaul of the controversial process used to assess property owners for landscaping and lighting services.
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Director Gary Kinghorn said during Wednesday’s meeting that ongoing concerns from residents and board members had not been addressed.
“We’ve spent considerable effort trying to rethink this over the last 12 months, and for whatever reason, nothing was reflected in this year’s engineer’s reports,” he said, referring to the annual reports used to calculate how much each property owner is assessed for landscaping and lighting services. “We have work to do, significant work to do.”
Kinghorn and the four other board members directed district staff to develop a plan to review the existing process by the board’s September meeting.
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Despite their dissatisfaction with the overall process, board members ultimately voted 3-2 to approve this year’s engineer’s reports, with Kinghorn and Director Stephen Ferry dissenting.
“We’re doing the best we can with an antiquated system and being consistent with the law,” board Vice President Heidi Hannaman said during the meeting.
The El Dorado Hills Community Services District uses landscaping and lighting assessment districts to fund shared services such as parks, medians and streetlights. Costs for those services are divided between residents of the landscaping and lighting assessment districts, or LLADs, and the broader Community Services District.
For years, residents and officials had raised concerns about the methods used to determine how much property owners must pay toward those services.
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Every year, the Community Services District pays for engineer’s reports that outline each LLAD’s budget and calculate how the costs will be divided among property owners.
Property owners are charged based on the benefits they receive from the LLAD’s amenities. For example, a neighborhood with landscaped medians might pay to maintain those features. But the exact methodology used to define and quantify those benefits varies by LLAD.
The Community Services District is legally required to follow the rules established for each of its 24 LLADs. But many residents believed the resulting assessment calculations were arbitrary, according to Ben Glickman, vice chair of the LLAD advisory committee.
“The way this works essentially asks somebody, an engineer, to determine benefit to homeowners from a particular amenity. There is no button you can push to make those determinations,” Glickman said during Wednesday’s meeting. “Ultimately, it’s a judgment by somebody about what is the value of a bocce ball court? What is the value of a park? What is the value of a streetlight? And not only what is the value of those amenities, but what is the value of those amenities to a particular homeowner?”
El Dorado Hills’ board created the volunteer advisory committee in 2022 to make recommendations on budgets, projects and planning, following a dispute with the El Dorado County Auditor-Controller over the accuracy of the assessments.
But the advisory committee has not convened for nearly a year, according to another committee member who spoke during Wednesday’s meeting. The district had not posted a meeting agenda for the group on its website since September 2025.
The committee was expected to reconvene in September, El Dorado Hills Community Services District General Manager Stephanie Jantzen said during the board meeting.
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