I don’t think anyone wants to be accountable for this one.
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Yank here*. People in my office look like I’ve just done a magic trick when I tell them that if they suffix their files with a YYYY-MM-DD, then their drafts/versions of documents will automatically date order when they do an alpha sort…
*self-identification, not a request…
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It’s a part of our QMS. Yet few people seem interested in dated and version-controlled files. Seems they would rather spend time re-doing work that mistakenly used the old data than spend few seconds thinking about a file name.
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Wouldn’t surprise me at all.
I see my guess about what was going on with the previous accountant seems to have been correct. He seems to have retired in the 80s.
A hypothetical for the people who are convinced the City should have contacted the property owner via another channel (e.g. the homeowners who use the street to access their property, who I understand are not the property owner, but members of an association that is the property owner):
If you gave someone an official document saying “You may contact me at this address/location/method and no other” and you owed that person a debt, would you then want that person to try to collect on that debt by contacting your neighbors? Your family? Your boss? I believe those debt collection methods are illegal in the US.
It isn’t a perfect fit for this specific situation, but it’s an angle I don’t see addressed in this comment thread, and I don’t think it’s a terribly large leap. The minimum the City could do to contact the owners may possibly also be the maximum the City could legally do.
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We didn’t have an HOA until we were forced to create one to deal with this mess. The original developer of the parcel never told the buyers that it was a private street.
So when we realized we needed one, I wrote the documents of incorporation from the point of view of someone who didn’t want an HOA telling him what to do. We have no covenants regarding appearance, lawn length, noise, satellite dishes on the roof, etc. Instead, we collect dues ($30/month, unchanged from 1989!) and use them to pay for insurance, snow removal, pavement maintenance, and garbage collection. Private garbage collection services in our area now retail for over $40/month, so our HOA is actually quite a bargain.
The only problem is in retaining a trustworthy volunteer to be the treasurer. Even with the ridiculously low dues, we still have some deadbeats who refuse to pay, and one has been openly hostile towards my wife. The declaration stipulates that serving on the board is an unpaid position. It also stipulates that the rates can’t be increased by more than 5% annually, so when we got sick of it and looked for a commercial firm to run it, bids started at $100/month, which nobody wants to pay. So treasurer-duty kind of rotates between a couple people, none of whom want the job. As far as the hostile deadbeat, we sent notice after notice and finally engaged a lawyer to file a lien on her property so when she sells, the HOA will be reimbursed anyway. And we also sent notice that she’s never to have contact with my wife again.
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I’ve already said that the HOA has some responsibility.
This isn’t a house or a car. It doesn’t have a permanent address. It is a side walk and streets. So it is a bit odd compared what one traditionally thinks about paying property taxes on. If it was your house or something the would have put a physical notice up, but they don’t do that in these cases. But if they take the type to typically put up a notice, why not spend 15 min finding the new contact info? I mean, its an HOA, those have to be registered, right? It seems to me this wouldn’t be that hard.
The link M_Dub posted that had some new information, shows that the current people in the HOA didn’t know about it. So some person dropping the ball 30 years ago makes this ok? Mostly likely no one living there today was there 30 years ago. They claimed no one knew anything about it - and that seems pretty feasible if you ask me.
And the new owners waited a year before contacting the HOA - just to make sure the sale wouldn’t be rescinded. “Pretty sneaky, sis.”
Again, if this was ones’ own street, no one wouldn’t have this lase fair attitude about it. But it wasn’t. It was horrible rich people. So we can all have a laugh. Haha. Silly rich people. Now you will have to probably pay the “speculator” (which BB says are the evil scum of the earth who are driving up housing costs in many cities around the world - but they are totally cool now that they are sticking it to the man!) 2-5 times what they paid for it. The city made nearly $90k on the deal and is done with it. The rich have their street and side walks back. And the speculator made a tidy profit they can use for their next real estate venture. Justice has been served, and we can all go to bed knowing the world is just a little more “right”.
Sweet dreams.
Please help us understand your objection(s) to the situation. Is it:
- The property owners are not at fault because paperwork was lost/not filed
- The property owners shouldn’t lose their land because the City didn’t have the right address
- The City should have done more to contact the people who own the land
- The owners didn’t have enough notice
- The buyers used underhanded and unfair methods to buy the land
- Something else
You’ve posted a lot of angry-sounding rhetoric and you seem to think the City/the buyers acted maliciously or unscrupulously, but you’re not being clear about the persons or entities with whom you’re frustrated and what exactly they/it should have done differently. We’ve explained the concatenation of actions and responsibilities defined by and falling within the confines of established law, but you’re either unwilling to accept or unable to understand the reasons why the situation unfolded the way it did. Could you please pick one or more of items 1 - 6 and explain to us exactly why you object to the situation?
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Tina Lam and Michael Cheng.
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a) Why should they?
b) How hard is it for the HOA to notify the city of their current accountant’s address?
You know - like the law says they are obliged to?
So no one in all those 30 years was ever expected to notice that they weren’t getting any mail from City Hall or paying any property tax for the street?
Well, I would assume from what I’ve seen of your posts here that if this were your street, you would have your address of record up to date. If you don’t, I bet you will now! 
Personally, I’m not laughing about rich people losing their street. All the rest you say about what will probably happen is pretty much what I expect to happen to. These people are rich enough, they can just throw money at the problem until it’s solved.
I do have problems with people claiming that what has happened is somehow unfair. Property ownership comes with responsibilities.
Some of those are large and onerous. Ongoing maintenance and repairs for example. A new roof. Asbestos removal, etc.
Some are fairly minor - like in this case keeping your contact details with City Hall up to date and paying £14 a year in tax.
I have little sympathy with someone who can’t do the first. Anyone who genuinely can’t pay the second probably has bigger problems.
My sympathy for property owners who somehow can’t manage to keep their contact details up to date vanishes entirely when the property owners are wealthy and can afford to (and did) pay people to look after that sort of thing.
Should properties be seized to pay off unpaid taxes at all? That’s a wider question and one I have mixed views on.
I think it’s draconian but then again, that is deliberate and intended. The City (and therefore the people) have a strong interest in ensuring taxes get paid.
For property owners the strongest threat you can make to motivate them to pay their taxes is to take their property away.
Should that happen for ca. $900? Maybe not.
On the other hand, amongst other things I deal with trying to recover unpaid monies for people, mostly smallish tradesmen, builders and decorators, etc.
If you get a judgment, you still need to get the money somehow. One way is to put a charge on the debtor’s house and if they still won’t pay, maybe go for an order for sale.
Judges (and the property owners) are understandably not keen on orders for sale for small sums. If they don’t, my client is stuck with a judgment on which they will hopefully eventually see some money - but not until the debtor decides to sell or remortgage which could be ten or twenty years or more down the line. By that time, the money is useless to my client.
My take on it is if the sum involved is so small that it would be unfair to force a sale, it is small enough that the debtor should be expected to pay it.
In this case, taking a charge over the sidewalks, etc. would be pointless. They are effectively never going to be sold.
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And the other bidders on the lot…
Real Estate professionals…
Lawyers…
Accountants…
my mum…
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The real estate auction draws people looking to buy real estate. These people hunt down deals. Just like people who buy confiscated items and cars from police departments. Totally different thing.
I am not disputing there shouldn’t be property tax laws or even that confiscation isn’t an ultimate measure. But by all measures this looks to be an oversight. Some one some where dropped the ball and the current people had no idea this was even a thing. This is 2017 with the world’s information at our finger tips. The new owners and the news found the HOA with out a man hunt. Why is it unreasonable to ask a county clerk to spend 30 min and see if they can hunt up the correct contact info for the HOA so they can make one last attempt to collect the bill? Because if that happened I can’t see why they couldn’t have found that info. And it would have saved the city money vs the hours spent filing paper work for the sale. Oh - wait - no it wouldn’t because they grossed $90k on it. Never mind, I answered my own question.
There is a lot of government confiscation that is technically legal. I am not even saying all of it is nefarious or wrong. But this all could have been avoided if some effort was put in. Some kindness. Some curiosity to as why the mail kept coming back.
But like I said, this happened to people who have the means to fix it. So its all alright, and no ones lives are ruined, and at least one entity will probably prosper from this oversight and build their wealth, which really is the American Dream.
But there are PLENTY of pieces of property where the owners address is not the same as the address of the property. And it is the owner who owes property taxes, not a resident. The HOA, being run by professionals should have realized that they needed to give the city their address.
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does the city get to keep any amount above the $900? Or is that refunded to the (former) owners, as it is in a regular foreclosure?
I don’t know for certain.
I think this answers the question but I am not a California lawyer:
I could be looking at completely the wrong section, the wrong code or an out of date version. US laws and codes read like something out of the Victorian era to me.
Assuming that is the right code and section,
first the state gets a piddly sum,
then the county gets $150,
then the county gets its costs of preparing and publishing all the very many notices it has to publish to get to the point of selling the property,
then the tax debt gets paid and distributed pro-rata on the agencies owed the tax.
It seems there is then another distribution to cover the taxes for the year in which the property was sold.
The remainder sits in a fund and the owners get to claim it back.
Unfortunately, they only have the right to claim it back if they do it during the year after the sale. After that it goes to the county general fund.
Oops.
Interestingly for @Mister44’s point about reasonableness, the code also says:
3365.
After the first publication of the notice and not less than 21 days nor more than 35 days before July 1, the tax collector shall send by registered mail to the last assessee of the tax-defaulted property at his or her last known address a notice of default and power to sell the property for nonpayment of taxes. The tax collector shall make a reasonable effort to ascertain the address of the last assessee of the tax-defaulted property, including, but not limited to, an examination of the assessment of this property on the rolls beginning with the year of delinquency to and including that of the last equalized roll, an examination of the most recent telephone books in the county in which the tax-defaulted property is located, and an examination of the telephone book covering the area of the last known address of the last assessee.
Unfortunately, it then goes on to say:
Any failure of the tax collector to make a reasonable effort to ascertain the address of the last assessee as required by this section shall not affect the validity of any subsequent sale to satisfy the lien of unpaid taxes.
So pretty useless really.
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