Criminally charged assessor resigns, county working to clean up mess

Published 12:00 am Saturday, November 7, 2026

By Michael Gripp

On Tuesday, Boone County Justices of the Peace gathered for their committee meeting. Interim Judge Mitchell Archer opened with an announcement: “The Boone County Assessor has resigned her position effective November the 2nd. She has resigned her current position and her elected position.” Brandi Diffey, charged earlier this year with abuse of office, leaves the position amid a series of issues described by employees at the meeting.

Archer said that they are working to verify the procedures necessary to find her replacement.

The quorum court has been going through each department’s proposed 2027 budgets the past few weeks. On Tuesday, the Assessor’s Office budget was presented. Given the circumstances surrounding Diffey’s resignation, Judge-elect Tyler Gentry requested more time to build the budget.

Gentry credited the employees of the Assessor’s Office with keeping things on track. She said, “With the current circumstances with our current assessor resigning, I think that everyone in this room knows that the only reason that office has been running and running smoothly is because the employees that are here at the county.”

She prefaced their budget examination by saying of the employees, “They have kind of been set up with not the best situation with the equipment they’re working with, with things needed for their vehicles. Kind of just across the board.”

Without having Diffey present, Gentry said it was difficult to understand the budget. Gentry said they were reviewing all the assessor’s office transactions to determine what made sense to proceed with in the budget.

As various line items were discussed, multiple office employees described the environment they worked in. The staff does not have keys or access to the office locks. According to staff, Diffey purchased locks for the office doors that operate from an app that the other employees say they do not have access to.

“The door locks that we have right now, there are people that can’t even get in their own office in the morning because it takes a thumbprint. They don’t have codes to it that were supposed to be programmed in. They don’t have the keys that were supposed to come with it. She kept us out. She didn’t give them to us,” one employee said. The thumbprint readers were apparently finicky, denying entry if it was too hot or cold, if lotion was present, or for other common reasons.

JP Kyle Evatt asked, “Who thought this through?”

Perhaps summing up the totality of the situation, an employee replied, “It’s like a lot of things. There wasn’t a lot of thinking going through.”

The computer systems purchased by Diffey have also hamstrung the employees, they said. Employees described systems that can’t be used with more than one monitor, can’t connect to scanners or printers, and require at least one employee to spend an extra two hours a day to get them working properly.

“It’s not like we want fancy computers or anything like that,” an employee pointed out. “We want door locks so that we can get into our office; we want computers that work, we want printers that work. This is years of us going through this. It’s a necessity. We’ve been struggling with this going on four years.”

The hardware itself isn’t the only issue. Gentry described how Diffey had established IT support. “What she’s done is handicapped them a little bit because instead of paying for a maintenance agreement that handles all of the equipment, she buys equipment separately that they can’t work on. She has an agreement with an IT company that can’t even work on it.”

“Not all employees have telephones,” someone familiar with the office told the JPs. “Two important employees are sharing a telephone literally on a chair in between their desks, rolling it back and forth. This is multiple sets of employees.”

The Assessor’s Office vehicles have also lacked the attention they require, according to officials. Used to assess property, Gentry said the vehicles lack proper county markings, creating a potential safety concern when pulling into people’s driveways. Employees said the vehicles also need basic maintenance, such as replacing windshield wipers.

They haven’t had access to their own credit card since the county pulled them back countywide following multiple instances of misuse, including from Diffey, according to allegations. Gentry said Diffey could have come to the county for necessary purchases but never did. As a result, the office has been going without basic supplies.

“Now I think our office would feel a lot more comfortable with them having their own card,” Gentry added.

When these issues were brought up to Diffey, employees said she told them she would “look into it” but seemingly never did.

Diffey had run afoul of the Quorum Court in the past. In December of last year, the court removed funding from her office to prevent the purchase of what they deemed to be an unnecessary vehicle.

In that session, the QC also revised an ordinance that established which county employees and officials were authorized to take home county-owned vehicles. It had been suspected that Diffey had been using a county vehicle for personal use. Additionally, it was believed that Diffey was in the process of purchasing another vehicle using county funds.

According to court documents found at ARcourts.gov, Diffey’s jury trial is scheduled to begin on November 9.