Waterford — Being a municipal assessor is not boring.

That’s at least true for Mike Bekech, who has watched the ups and downs of the real estate market and the local economy from his desks at five town and city halls.

Each job he’s had, he said last week, a few days before he retired as Waterford’s town assessor, had its own challenges.

After graduating from Fairfield University and working at a bank and a stock brokerage firm, Bekech spent a year as a property appraiser in Bridgeport "looking at burnt-out buildings" in the 1970s while the city struggled with poverty and crime.

He later went to Groton, where "there are ten or eleven fire districts, depends how you count," working as the assistant assessor and assessor back when the officials in charge of calculating the value of the town’s properties did their work on individually typed pieces of card stock.

Sitting in his office last week, which was decorated by a map of the country’s major league ballparks — he’s been to all of them — photos of the antique cars he’s restored, and planes he's flown, he pulled a 1981 property card out of a file cabinet.  

“You always had an eraser in your hand,” Bekech remembered. “It was strictly by hand.”

The industry evolved quickly. In Groton, Bekech oversaw one of the first computer-assisted mass appraisals in the state.

The technology hasn’t made it clearer to people, though, that the assessor doesn’t actually have control over their tax bill, Bekech said.

"The budget’s put together by each department, then goes to … the board of finance, maybe through the (Representative Town Meeting), and maybe the board of selectmen first, and they come out with this budget. The mill rate is nothing more than that total money they need for taxes divided by the net taxable grand list," he explained.

"We’re just kind of the conduit between the budget and the actual collection. We don’t raise taxes. We distribute the taxes," he said.

If people’s tax bill goes up though, "people like to point at us ... Everyone likes to think of the assessor as this ornery little guy in the corner, but we're far from it. The majority of the profession has really learned that 'fair and equitable' is their charge."

Retirement will mean spending more time with his three children and their children, some freelance appraisals, a road trip to Wichita State University in Kansas for an annual public utilities conference and continuing to serve on various boards and commissions, including the board of the Niantic Christmas Light Parade.

It won't mean less shop talk, he said. That would be easy if his wife, Donna Price-Bekech, hadn't recently retired as the assessor in East Lyme.

"Assessment became a 24-hour-a-day deal," he said. "You'd come home at the end of the day and say 'this is bothering me.' Even now, she says, what did you do today?"

Watching property values go up and down has given Bekech a front-row seat to the biggest changes in the local and national economy.

Shortly after he arrived in Waterford in 1998 after a 10-year stint in Manchester, the federal government deregulated the electric wholesale market, Connecticut opened the retail electric industry to competition, and Northeast Utilities auctioned off its three Millstone nuclear reactors, which at the time accounted for 80 percent of the town's tax rolls.

Waterford then found itself in a years-long tax dispute with the new owner, Dominion Nuclear.

"I can't tell you how many times I was ... brought in for interrogatories, sitting on the stand, testifying on valuation issues. And while this case was going on for five years, we were still putting values on the plant every year, so the hole was getting deeper."

Dominion now pays about 34 percent of the town's taxes. But the town has adjusted well, he said.

"The changes are steep, but technically if you look at the number we're still at the light end of normal. We still have a favorable tax situation compared to most," he said.

Bekech said he appreciates his profession as a window into the decisions people make.

"You and I might be looking at the same house, and you might be willing to pay more because it has a porch just like the one your grandmother’s house when you grow up. You remember sitting on the porch, it gives you warm feelings. It might have the right color scheme … and all your furniture will fit perfect. Value is a range, it’s not just a scientific number," he said.

m.shanahan@theday.com