LAKE COUNTY — Over 200 properties will be put on the auction block in May in the latest response to demands from local government leaders that more be done to sell off properties whose owners have not paid their property taxes, but some officials say the sale won’t go far enough.
In November, the City of Clearlake mailed letters to the county and the state calling for investigations into the Lake County Tax Collector’s Office regarding what the city called that department’s “history of inaction” in selling properties that are in tax default.
At that time, the city said numbers provided to it by county staff revealed a delinquent property tax total of $18.3 million on 12,500 properties in Lake County, including more than 3,500 in the city itself. $8.3 million of those unpaid taxes were attached to properties currently eligible for auction by the county, the city noted.
Now, the Lake County Board of Supervisors has passed a resolution to move forward with a tax-defaulted land sale slotted to begin May 29 (the auction would end on June 2). A total of 217 properties with a total minimum bid amount of $3.6 million have been determined to be listed for sale. 118 of those properties are located in the City of Clearlake.
Before the board unanimously approved the planned tax sale on Tuesday, District 2 Supervisor Bruno Sabatier asked that the county increase the resources it is applying to such sales in order to more quickly reduce the number of tax-defaulted properties countywide.
“At 217 (parcels sold each year) it would take about 40 years to go through the entire list,” Sabatier said, noting that that timeframe would grow as more properties fall into delinquency.
Sabatier called for 1,000 properties to be auctioned every year in order to greatly reduce the number of delinquent parcels within 10 years.
Clearlake Mayor Russ Cremer said 1,000 properties should be a “minimum” yearly amount. He also asked that more than one tax auction be done per year.
“This is a mess,” Cremer said. “We have to clean it up. This is our revenue.”
Lake County Treasurer-Tax Collector Barbara Ringen noted that about half of the 12,500 delinquent properties have not been in default long enough to actually be eligible for auction, and that still more are “paper lots”—generally, undeveloped parcels that do not have street access.
District 3 Supervisor E.J. Crandell added that his own constituents (District 3 stretches from Blue Lakes to Clearlake Oaks, much of it along Clear Lake’s northern shore) want to see more frequent tax sales as well.
“They say the same exact thing, that they’d like to see the tax sales done more often,” Crandell said.
Sabatier also asked that another employee be added to the tax collector’s office, and dedicated to holding tax defaulted land sales.
In its discussions about the issue of tax-defaulted properties, the City of Clearlake has frequently tied the prevalence of such properties to increased blight and code enforcement woes. Cremer on Tuesday said that the properties in Clearlake which are not being paid for are “generally the ones that we find the blight on, and the ones that we are red-tagging.”
Clearlake Vice Mayor Dirk Slooten told the county board, “Clearlake is trying to revitalize itself and we need your help allocating enough resources to get the tax collector able to do these sales.”
District 5 Supervisor Rob Brown expressed support for the tax sales, but argued that high property taxes in California are at least partially to blame for the problem of delinquency.
“All these properties that are burdened with these sales, there’s a reason that they are, because people can’t afford them,” he said.
And Brown argued that some delinquent properties are well cared-for.
“Not all of them are trash properties,” he said. “Some of them are the only thing that these folks have, and the only thing between them and homelessness is a tax lien sale, so I want to be very careful about that.”
Lake County’s 2020 tax auction will be held on the third-party website bid4assets.com.
