Lake County commissioners will hold tax sales this spring and summer and oppose any new legislation that would cut into the potential profits they could make.
Lake County Attorney John Dull said Wednesday that the Board of Commissioners authorized real estate auctions of about 13,000 tax-delinquent properties from April 23 to 25 and again from July 23 to 25.
The tax sales collect millions of dollars from land speculators who buy tax-delinquent properties and discourage other owners from becoming deadbeats, too.
Last year commissioners collected more than $3 million from the sale of more than 2,300 properties and scared hundreds of other owners into belatedly paying an additional $1 million in overdue taxes to get their properties off the auction block.
The money this year's sales promise is critical to a county government being forced into deficit spending by state-mandated property tax cuts and a persistently depressed economy.
However, SRI President Jim Hughes, whose Indianapolis-based company has conducted many of the county's tax auctions over the years, said proposed legislation threatens to make such sales cost prohibitive.
He said one bill would require a multimillion-dollar process of finding and notifying past mortgage holders for each parcel, despite the fact thousands of tax sale properties have been abandoned for more than a decade and many of the financial institutions that held their mortgages are out of business.
Commissioners voted to have their legislative lobbyist signal their disapproval of that legislation.
They also will monitor another bill that would permit the county to create a land bank of abandoned properties. The land bank would resolve any issues with past owners for the purposes of redeveloping them into viable tax-paying real estate.
