On Monday there was an article in the Republican-American about properties being sold at auction by Waterbury's Office of Revenue Collection. The focus of the article was the difficulty the city has selling these properties. Some of the reasons for the difficulty include the high price of the back taxes and interest due on the properties. This is certainly a valid problem for many properties. There's not much incentive to buy a property worth $25,000 when you have to pay $75,000 in back taxes on it.
Personally, I think the main problem might be lack of information. The article in the paper mentions the difficulty that the city has in "getting the word out" about the properties for sale. Nowhere in the article is there a listing of the properties for sale this week. D'oh! A great big article about how there is a property auction this Thursday, and a complaint about how no one knows which properties are for sale, but no list of the properties. I decided to follow up by visiting the city's website to see if the properties were listed there. For a brief moment, I became optimistic -- there is a link on the Tax Collector's page to a listing for a Tax Lien Sale. The link takes you to the listing for a property sale held June 23, 2005. Good grief! Is the city so short on funds that they can't pay someone to spend five minutes uploading a document? We already have a corruption hotline; maybe it's time for an incompetence hotline....
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