Mitchell seeks GOP nomination for Stafford Treasurer; focused on customer service

Heather Mitchell is seeking the GOP nomination for Stafford County Treasurer.

Mitchell already works in the treasurer’s office as a chief deputy to outgoing treasurer Laura Rudy, who chose not to run for re-election after serving since 2008. Rudy endorsed Mitchell when she announced her retirement in December 2022.

Mitchell ran twice for a Virginia House of Delegates seat to replace former Delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy in 2019 and again in 2021. Delegate Candi Mundon King currently holds the seat.

Mitchell has been married to her husband of 24 years, with whom she shares three children, ages 20 to 27.

Mitchell faces Mike Sienkowski in the GOP Primary Election on June 20, 2023. Find your polling place.

I interviewed Mitchell about her race. You can see the entire interview video here.

You received the endorsement of the outgoing treasurer, Laura Rudy. What does that mean for you and your campaign?

“Well, what it means is actually, I can continue to carry on basically the legacy of Laura. She will retire at the end of this year after 16 years of faithful service to the county. And I have had an incredible opportunity in the fact that to be mentored and trained by her, starting out in delinquent collections, it’s conceivably one of the harder jobs within the office. And it was something that I found because when you first hear delinquent collections, it kind of has a bad taste in your mouth, I guess you could say. But what I found out is people want to be able to pay their taxes. It’s not like they’re trying to avoid it. It’s just sometimes they can’t.”

“And speaking with taxpayers on a daily basis really, I guess, drives me in doing what I want to do and being able to serve the community. What I did when I started, was I went through all of the processes and procedures of how we went about collecting taxes. One of the interesting things is, prior to my arrival, on average, we were writing off about $600,000 a year annually in taxes because the way the Virginia code is set up is that you can only collect taxes for up to five years.”

“So at the end of that five years, it starts getting written off. And since I joined the team, we have collected basically in excess of $2.4 million in delinquent taxes and fees that otherwise would have been written off. So I went through it, and we streamlined the processes and procedures. What’s interesting was when I was hired, it actually got us back to our staffing numbers from 2008. So we still have the staffing capacity of what we had in 2008, yet our county has grown by at least 40,000 people. So it’s the same amount of people doing the work, plus 40,000 people.”

Several changes were introduced to the Stafford County Treasurer’s Office under Rudy to include a DMV Select. What do you intend to keep? And what other changes would you like to see? What more could this office do to serve the public?

“Well, obviously, we want to keep the DMV Select because a lot of the residents do use this. If you need to do a title change, renew your registration. We can do things like that. We can’t do driver’s licenses or anything like that. But one of the other things that I am looking at doing is right now we do collections, for we have a contract with the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office where we collect court fines and fees.”

“And this program is really nice because the monies that they collect actually pay their own salary. So there’s no money coming out of the taxpayer’s pocket to fund these positions. What I’m looking to do is actually expand it over into utilities to assist them, setting up a similar program to keep it all in-house in the county.”

“…we want to promote invoice cloud. So as a lot of people know that we’ve transitioned to a new payment portal. And what we’re trying to do is give the power of how a taxpayer pays their bills to give them control. So what we’re doing we’re in the middle of converting to where you can have paperless billing.

“We didn’t want to implement that right away. We wanted everybody to get kind of comfortable with our system because what we plan to do is if you want to opt out of having a paper bill sent to you, you click the button you’ve got control of if you want to be sent a hard copy bill or not.”

“A lot of people, which is funny, even if you have a zero balance, a lot of people still like to get those bills because a lot of those accounts are people that are in some sort of tax relief. It could be senior relief. It could be veterans’ relief. And it’s kind of like a check and balance to make sure that their exemption is still being appropriately applied.”

Stafford County’s population has grown by 40,000 since 2008 and continues to grow. From the treasurer’s office perspective, what will be some of the challenges as Stafford County continues to grow, and how will you work to overcome them?

“With the population increase, obviously, it comes in the form of technology. How can we streamline things to make it easier for the taxpayer? Right now, like I said, staffing wise, we’re still at 2008 numbers, but we’re still getting the job done and we’re doing an incredibly efficient job of doing it. And we always do it with a smile because my big thing is customer service.”

“And everybody at work hates it when I say this, but it’s true that customer service is not a department and it’s an attitude… But it is challenging because there are still a lot of things that we have to do manually because you need to have attention to detail that only a person can provide. And we don’t want to think of people as just an automated number. We want to have personal interaction. And that’s why I am a huge proponent of having the advanced technology because we have a brilliant staff, It staff that is on top of making sure all of our programs run correctly.”