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Wawarsing Homes A Highlight Of Tax Auction
What Causes The County To Swoop In For Payment?

REGIONAL – This year's Ulster County public auction of properties with overdue local property taxes turned out to be a little smaller than previous years, possibly a sign of the recovery in the economy.

As is always the case, the list of such properties is extended by fragments of land here and there, long narrow strips with no road frontage, triangles of less than an acre, accidents of subdividing and land use. However, before the auction there did appear to be an uptick in single family homes on the initial list from Wawarsing.

"I struggle with those when they are single family homes," noted Ulster County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach on the latter matter, which he had also brought up in a press release prior to the April 20 auction at SUNY Ulster in Stone Ridge.

What happens, he explained, is that if you fail to pay your property taxes for three years in a row, then your home or other property can be seized by the county and sold at auction to pay the taxes. Auerbach has been investigating the dimensions of the problem this poses for some of our more vulnerable citizens.

"I'm finding out that with these residential properties, the great majority of people want to pay their taxes but they just can't," he added. "Say you have a husband and wife and they're in their eighties. They have no mortgage and they live off social security and a little bit of retirement savings. But then one of them gets ill and it throws their finances out of whack. In three years they could be facing the loss of their home."

Ulster County Finance Commissioner Bert Gulnick noted that there are efforts made to avert disaster.

"We offer installment plans as a last resort. There's also some funding available from RUPCO, and then there are reverse mortgages. We're always trying to refer people in trouble to things that might help them; we even refer them to Social Services sometimes," he said before noting the emotional toll the annual auctions take. "It hits me in the heart when a senior calls me and says 'When do I need to get out my home?'"

However, Gulnick added that the problem isn't terribly widespread. Most people do manage to pay their taxes.

"There are 87,000 tax parcels in Ulster County and in this year's brochure we had 293 up for auction. So it's miniscule, but it's upsetting," he said. "Also, many people bought their properties back before the auction so it turned out to be fewer than that."

Auerbach pointed to one continuing area of concern, however.

"There were more than fifty single family homes, especially in Wawarsing," he again noted. "Some of them were redeemed before the auction; folks came in and paid up. Some of the local banks have realized the plight of these people and have come forward to help them out."

Wawarsing supervisor Leonard Distel said that he feels that most people are coping.

"I talk to our tax collector Robin Anderson. The taxes are in, people manage to pay. But we do see some things like if they have a mortgage and they can't make the payment, what some do is they leave in the middle of the night and send the keys back to the bank," he said. "Banks used to go after people like that, but now they don't bother tracking those people down; they put the house up for sale... Everybody is having a tough time. You have to put money away out of your retirement check to pay these taxes."

Distel went on to lambaste the issue of tax exempt properties, both religious and non-profit.

"Every year at the Association of Towns annual meeting we pass resolutions for reform of the tax laws on this. It goes up to Albany and never gets out of committee. But reform has to be at the state level," the supervisor said. "Consolidation of the Village of Ellenville with the Town of Wawarsing might help, too. We have to wait for the process to be done. But it's up to the village; the town people don't have a say in this."

Meanwhile, Auerbach added that he too sees the issues behind private home auctions for tax non-payments as a problem for the state, as New York has the highest property taxes in the country and is losing people at a steady rate.

"We place this burden on our property owners," he said. "I really want to start bringing that to a statewide level, and getting discussion going."



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