Property Tax Auction

I'd like to say a word or two about the tax auction controversy.

If you don't pay your County property taxes, a four-and-a-half year process starts, during which you receive dozens of notices in the mail and, if you own a residential property, the Treasurer himself goes out to the property to try and contact you in person.  There's a deadline, which in Otsego County's case is not the day of the sale but, instead, about a month and a half before the sale.  If payment isn't made by the deadline, the property goes to auction.  State law prohibits you from bidding on your own property.

In this kind of system, where people's homes are often at risk, it's important to make sure that the owners have every opportunity to pay the back taxes and get their homes off the auction list.  In Otsego County, the notification process is longer and more intense than in many other counties.  Dozens of contacts - including face to face - during four and a half years represents diligence in the extreme.

But eventually, there's a deadline.  In some counties, it's the day of sale.  When that's the case, and properties are withdrawn from sale minutes before it begins, buyers become frustrated and don't return.  In Otsego County, the deadline is more than a month before the auction.  This creates a period of time when the property isn't sold, but during which the owner can't pay the taxes any more.  

A deadline is a deadline, regardless of what comes after.  But when people's homes are at stake, tragic stories unfold.  You'd like to provide a second chance - but the County has provided four and a half years of second chances.  Any exception will embroil the County and its taxpayers in years of litigation when every other tax delinquent property owner demands - and rightly so! - the same exception.

This, then, is the very last step in a very long process that has given the property owner every opportunity to get back on track and retain their home.  Our heartbreak - and it is real - might be eased if we understood that essential concept.