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Several County Council members attended Tuesday’s County
Commissioner meeting where Commissioner President John Evans, R-North, veered
off the agenda to address reaction spurred by County Auditor Robert Wichlinski’s
move last week to excuse homestead credit violators from paying back taxes if
they corrected their homestead credit records with the auditor’s office. After
learning there is no state law that allows counties authority to do that, Evans
asked council members and State Rep. Ed Soliday, R-Valparaiso, what can be done
to straighten out delinquent tax issues.
“Since this has come up in the last few days, not many of us know
what our options are,” said Evans.
Soliday said there is a law just put into place, House Bill 1090,
which he co-authored, that allows the county council to grant a one-year
moratorium on all interest and penalties on real property, businesses and
residencies, owed before Jan. 1, 2012. The taxpayer can have their fees dropped
if they are able to pay up all current and back taxes through a payment plan
agreed to by the county treasurer by July 1, 2013.
The bill, Soliday said, was based on a system which Lake County
already had in place to keep properties from winding up on tax sales in these
“terrible economic times” and applied it statewide. Often counties would be
stuck with properties they could not sell because the taxes exceeded the actual
value of the property, Soliday said.
HB 1090 gives delinquent taxpayers an incentive to settle
delinquencies with the county from the last three years, and in turn, a way for
the county to collect more revenue owed to taxing units. That includes
delinquencies from homestead violators.
But Soliday said every county is different in the way they collect
revenue which makes the HB 1090 measure “extremely complex.”
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Soliday said he has been in communication with the DLGF hoping it
can render an opinion on multi-unit exemptions. He said the law really is
intended for “one-two-three-four” places, where 25 percent of a multi-unit
property is a residence which receives the homestead credit and the other 75
percent is run as a business and should receive no exemption. A scenario that
is not as black-and-white is when “the little old widow rents out a room to a
college student,” said Soliday.
The part of the law requiring counties to recoup unpaid taxes is
easier to understand. “The law is clear. You must collect the taxes,” Soliday
said.
The county has collected over $1.4 million in revenue from
homestead violations, Evans said, which has been put into a non-reverting fund
in the auditor’s budget. Soliday questioned whether the money should be stored
in a non-reverting fund as state lawmakers never anticipated that type of fund
accumulating such a large amount.
A few County Council members have posed the same question
including Karen Conover, R-3rd, who feels the money should be returned to the
taxing units hit hard by the tax caps. “It should be shared,” she said.
Evans said he would like to see the money go into the county’s
general fund once the auditor’s expenses are covered. Soliday said he would be
interested in drawing up a bill that could accomplish that.
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Meanwhile, County Treasurer Mike Bucko said he has no authority to
give tax amnesty, but is considering payment plans that make it easier for
delinquent taxpayers to catch up on taxes and eliminate the risk of appearing on
the list for a sheriff’s sale.
In regards to possible amnesty plans, Bucko said the nature of
those would have to be determined by the county council.
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