Assessor’s PAL Program Signups in SaddleBrooke

SBINSIDER EXCLUSIVE PAL SIGNUPS AT HOA1, HOA2| March 8th, 2025

Pinal County Assessor Douglas Wolf, (Unit 1) has arranged for of his staff to be at HOA1 and HOA2 to signup people for the newly created PAL program.

“Due to the overwhelming response to this new program, and the fact that applications must be taken in person, I have tasked four of our staff to be on location to take applications from SaddleBrooke residents,” said Wolf. “Remember to bring your Government ID, too.

HOA1: Tuesday March 11th, come in to the Clubhouse lobby and our staff will be waiting there from 8AM to 3PM.

HOA2: Tuesday, March 11th, the two staff will be positioned at the Agate Room, located in the Arts and Crafts complex  8AM-3PM.

“If resident cannot make it to this event, they can still take advantage of the PAL program anytime, but they will have to make the 47 mile trip to Florence,” Wolf added.

The idea of the PAL program has evolved as property title theft has become more of a problem. “When we first became aware of it about 5 years ago, it was very rare and did not seem to be an issue that Assessor’s should deal with, said Wolf, but the thieves got busy and become aggressive and we have seen people lose their properties to fraud. ”

Former Pinal County Recorder Virginia Ross started the first free service for this problem in the United States, when she offered citizens the opportunity to register their properties to receive email alerts if any legal document was recorded against their parcel. Many residents did sign up. The problem then was, if a person got a fraud alert, what the next step was-the County cannot give legal advice, so a person would likely have file documents prepared by an real estate lawyer to clean the title.

“As the Assessor, I thought we should do more, if we legally could. After consulting top legal minds, we designed our PAL system which we think will act as a huge deterrent to would be thieves. ” A thief seeing online that a parcel was protected by a PAL registration, we think, would be more likely to move to an easier target,” added Wolf. “But if they still tried to commit fraud, when a PAL protected deed of transfer comes to my staff, we will call and email you until we get an OK or not, for 30 days which is long as we can delay the transfer.”

“Currently we are working with the new County Attorney, Brad Miller, to alert their office for possible prosecution of these fraudsters,” Wolf said. Attorney Miller relayed to me that he intended to vigorously pursue this type of crime.

According to statistics, the mostly likely target for this type of fraud is a property that has no mortgage and is owned by an elderly man or woman.