19 tax-delinquent properties face foreclosure
By Kevin O’Brien
Nineteen tax-delinquent properties will be the subject of a court hearing this afternoon (Wednesday) in Wausau for what Marathon County officials expect to be the last step in an effort to acquire the parcels and auction them off.
If the court proceeding goes as anticipated, corporation counsel Michael Puerner told supervisors last week that ownership of the properties will be transferred to the county, which plans on auctioning them off using the Wisconsin Surplus website. According to online court records, one of the properties has an Edgar address and another is located in rural Marathon.
The anticipated foreclosures are the first to be accomplished using the “in rem” process, which allows the county to pursue multiple tax-delinquent properties at once instead of one at a time. Puerner said the county started with a list of 50 properties, but 31 of them were removed after the owners paid their past-due taxes.
The county is preparing to pursue foreclosure on a second batch of 93 tax-delinquent properties through the in rem process next, he said.
“We’re hoping that it goes smooth enough in court that we can accomplish that,” Puerner told members of the Human Resources, Financing and Property Committee.
With the first set of 50 parcels, county treasurer Connie Beyersdorf said her office was able to get a majority of the property owners to pay off their tax debts simply by sending them warning letters. She said most of them took out loans so they could stay in their homes, though a few are the subject of bankruptcy or probate proceedings, so the county “can’t touch them.”
The second batch of properties started at 177, but 84 owners have paid off their back taxes, leaving 93 left to be filed using the in rem process, Beyersdorf said.
In January, Beyersdorf said the county had collected over $6 million from taxdelinquent property owners, and since then, that number has doubled, to $12 million. The county has already paid those unpaid taxes to local municipalities, school districts and technical colleges, so Beyersdorf said the county is just recouping those costs.
Altogether, Beyersdof said the treasurer’s office is focusing on 311 of the “worst” taxdelinquent properties, those with debts stretching back three years or more. She said most homeowners will do what they can to pay off their debts.
“They’re realizing ‘This is an investment I want to keep,’” she said.
Beyersdorf said many of the delinquent properties have been inherited, so her office encourages the owners to sell the parcels so that taxes can be paid off. She also noted that 30 of the 311 parcels are “slivers,” tiny pieces of land squeezed between full-sized parcels that could be offered for sale to the neighboring property owners.
“We have to look at that,” she said.
Committee chairman John Robinson said the county itself also own several remnant parcels it’s looking to offload, so it should establish a protocol for dealing with those situations.
“I think we offer the slivers to the adjoining property owners and if someone doesn’t want it, then we’ve got to figure out what to do with it,” he said.
County clerk Kim Trueblood said the county has netted over $176,000 from selling 11 foreclosed properties on Wisconsin Surplus. Two other properties have drawn interest from the city of Wausau and two others are slivers that have only received low-ball offers, she said.
Trueblood said Wisconsin Surplus has been “absolutely fabulous” to work with, though it does take some staff time to put new parcels up for auction.
“We will get them listed just as soon as they are given to us from the court process, and we can continue to get them sold and back on the tax rolls,” she said.
