Concession in City/County Tax Collection Dispute

It seems like they might have a proposal to solve one tiny portion of the dispute, but we still don’t know what tiny percentage of people will take advantage of this, there’s still the foreclosure/delinquency issue that is not resolved and the question of if all the costs for new software, reprogramming and other staff headaches are going to be worth it.

From: Clear, Mark
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2010 1:06 PM
To: ALL ALDERS
Cc: Cieslewicz, Dave; Harmon, Ray; Gawenda, Dave
Subject: Property tax installments

Dear Colleagues,

I want to bring you up to date on a modification I plan to introduce regarding the property tax installments proposal.

As you probably know, the county exec and county treasurer are opposed to the city plan, and all 37 supervisors are co-sponsors of county board resolution 34, which opposes the plan.

Last evening the resolution was before the county Personnel and Finance Committee, and I went to testify and float an idea. I offered to them that I would introduce a city resolution that the city would pay to the county 90% of interest and penalties collected by the city on delinquent properties. (I picked this number to approximately cover the city’s costs, based on Mr. Gawenda’s estimates.) The idea here is to take off the table the issue of whether the city would benefit financially at the expense of the county, and focus on the benefits to city taxpayers.

The committee was open to this idea and felt it demonstrated a gesture of good faith toward resolving this disagreement. Based on my testimony, the committee postponed (that’s county-speak for referred) their resolution. I believe this is a very positive step toward improving the relationship between our two governments.

The logistics of this are a bit complicated, so bear with me. I’ve asked the city attorney to draft a resolution as described above, which I will introduce at the 6/15 council meeting for referral to BOE. This will be a separate item from the two that are coming up for action at that meeting, namely the ordinance amendment (Legistar 18498 to implement the change), and the budget amendment (Legistar18456 to modify the tax collection software). I recommend that on 6/15 we adopt the budget amendment so that IT can start their work on the software, and refer the ordinance amendment to the July 6th meeting so that it can be considered along with the payment agreement resolution. (Should the ordinance amendment fail at that time, IT assures me we can cancel the software modification project and incur only minimal costs.)

I appreciate you all reading this far and for engaging on this issue, and would welcome your comments, questions or co-sponsorship of the new resolution, which I will send out when it’s available. Thank you.

Mark C.

A story on this topic is here. I’m still not sure what this is all about, and I don’t know if this solves anything. I guess we’ll see at the next Board of Estimates meeting. More background information here and here: