Lake County leaders are trying to close a loophole that they say lets speculators hold onto land parcels without paying property taxes.
When property taxes go unpaid for a period of time, the piece of land is auctioned off at a county tax sale. But if no one bids, the owner gets to keep the property, and there's nothing stopping that owner from participating in other tax sales to accumulate more land.
Commissioner Michael Repay says that's a problem for the county trying to collect taxes, cities and towns missing out on the revenue, and, ultimately, for the surrounding community. "You've got to have an end use because, after all, the end use should be something meaningful to the community," Repay said during Wednesday's meeting of the Indiana University Northwest Chancellor's Commission for Community Engagement.
A recent series of studies by IU Northwest identified more than 9,200 property "churners" — tax delinquent parcels that have remained unsold through multiple tax sales.
Now, local officials are putting together a process letting those "churners" be turned over to local communities, if they remain unsold for at least two years. Matt Fech, the attorney for the Lake County Commissioners, hopes the Indiana General Assembly will consider it during the 2023 session.
"If this does get through in the springtime, I think that you'll see a lot of these churner properties that were referred to, that those will come off of the tax sale and they'll be placed back on the tax rolls either through development or people purchasing them and redeveloping those houses," Fech said during Wednesday's meeting.
