Retiring county official rose with God from difficult childhood

Karen Fisher jokes that she even hates herself when she writes her self a check to pay for her property taxes.

"I hate that Karen Fisher," she jokes.

Fisher has been the elected Orange County Tax Assessor-Collector for nearly eight years and Wednesday is her last day after working in the office for 32 years.

It's been a tradition for decades for checks to pay property taxes and the vehicle registrations collected in the office to be written to the personal name of the tax assessor-collector. The funds go into an account overseen by the county.

But after joking about paying her property taxes, she said she's learned that people must pay them as a way to get public services like fire protection and law enforcement, along with upkeep of public roads. She's had a first-hand view of how those monies are spent.

Taxing entities also need to pay their employees, she said, and if those employees are not being paid good wages, they will go to another job.

All those checks written during the past eight years would total an amount "beyond your belief," Fisher said.

Even though she doesn't keep that money personally, having those kind of checks with her name on them was beyond the imagination of a young Karen, being raised as the youngest of five children by grandparents. Her grandfather was blind and her grandmother worked in a cafeteria.

She said her parents divorced when she was nine months old. "My mother didn't want me," she said.

So all five children went to their paternal grandparents house in Jennings, Louisiana. Her alcoholic father had "a suitcase job." He would leave for work on Monday morning and return on Friday evenings. "He would get dressed, go to the bars and he wouldn't return until Sunday night," she said.

Every two weeks when the children visited their mother, the woman never wanted to play with little Karen and ignored her.

"I was raised by my grandmother. She taught me the values that I live by now," Fisher said. Those values include a strong faith in God. "I believe he had his hand on me from Day One," she said.

When she was 16, Fisher broke her grandmother's heart by dropping out of school and getting married in 1973. She promised her grandmother she would get a GED, the equivalent of high school.

She and her husband soon had two children and had moved to Orange so he could work at the old American Bridge fabricating yard on the Sabine River.

But they divorced. "He was an alcoholic," she said.

She got different jobs and started going to Lamar-Orange, first to get her GED and the studying to get a two-year degree in accounting. She started work at the county tax assessor-collector's office in August of 1992 and graduated in May 1993.

She made sure her grandmother came to see her get her degree and see her promise come true.

Fisher's son graduated from high school the same year she graduated from Lamar-Orange. They had professional pictures made of them together wearing their caps and gowns. The photographer said he had never had mother-son graduates posing before.

Another accomplishment in her life is reaching out to her mother before her death. "God told me I needed to forgive my mom if I wanted peace with myself," Fisher said.

She went to her dying mother and told her "I'm asking you to forgive me for anything I've done wrong," she recalled. "She went limp, like a wet noodle." And so did Fisher.

"A relief came over me," she said.

Fisher married a second time, but he passed away. She and her husband now have been married 20 years and he's already retired.

During her career at the county, she has seen many changes, and she always gives credit to the staff for making the office run. Fisher began working in the Vidor office in the subcourthouse and learned things that needed to be improved there.

She has improved security at the main office and the Vidor office. At the Orange main office, she had counters lowered. Before, the clerks sat low and could not always see a customer walking up. By lowering the counter a few inches, clerks can see customers and vice versa. Covid grant money helped the office get windows for every counter.

But changes come quickly to the work in her office because of constantly changing rules and laws. The state legislature doesn't help by making last-minute laws.

Those changes are the reason she's retiring. Studying all new rules takes concentration and she's beginning to tire of the work. She told Commissioners Court that she always wanted to give 110 percent of her effort to the citizens of Orange. If she couldn't reach that level of work, it was time to go.