LINCOLN, Maine — Town leaders have filed notices of tax liens on 61 properties for nonpayment of property taxes for fiscal year 2010, the same number pursued for the 2009 fiscal year, Town Manager Lisa Goodwin said Monday.
Town Treasurer Gilberte Mayo mailed the notices last week. Property owners have several weeks to pay or contest the outstanding taxes or Mayo will ask the Town Council whether the town should foreclose on and assume ownership of the properties, Goodwin said.
The town takes possession of very few homes, Goodwin said Monday. “We try to make every effort to have the property owner keep the property.”
The continued struggles of the regional and state economy are probably the biggest cause for the homeowners’ failure to pay taxes on time, Goodwin said.
“Once somebody gets into a pattern of not getting taxes paid, sometimes it will snowball into this foreclosure effect,” Goodwin said. “The first year they get behind and they are in hardship and then suddenly next year’s taxes are due. It compounds the problem for them until foreclosure becomes a problem.”
Lincoln mailed 46 tax lien notices in 2008, 44 in 2007, 51 each in 2006 and 2005, and 41 in 2004, according to records Goodwin provided.
If homeowners rejected council efforts to mediate the tax disputes, town officials will auction the foreclosed properties, Goodwin said. She said she did not know how many properties the town had foreclosed upon in recent years.
Hmmm, what happened to all the wonderous wealth and jobs that were to come to Lincoln from the long disputed Rollins wind project? All the economic reports coming out of Lincoln lately seem to indicate that just the opposite occured. Big wind IS a Big scam! How many waterfront camps and/or homes with views o fthe turbines are currently for sale compared to the historical average? What are the average days on the market for these properties compared to the historical average?
The only pockets in the area that have been enriched are those of a couple of the large timberland property owners who have 20 year leases to the wind developers, and they were already very wealthy.
Ok, enough already. Yeah the windmills cause people to not pay their taxes, The noise is horrible, the windmills are towering over the entire town. WE GET IT. You hate the windmills. The same number of people got notices in 2009, This was when you were fighting windmills coming into Lincoln. GIVE IT A REST. The reason people can’t pay their taxes is not the Windmills.
No, you don’t “get it!” The question remains, where are all the riches and jobs that this project was going to create? It’s a fair question. Those of us who have done the research necessary to understand what the actual vs. promised implications of these projects are, will continue to ask the tough questions as more and more of these needless, useless projects are planned and proposed. What happened in the Lincoln area needn’t happen in other towns around the state. We’ll continue voicing our opinions until disreputable developers like First Wind are escorted to the Kittery bridge.
These are the same people that couldn’t pay their taxes over and over again. Possibly because they CAN’T work or possibly they don’t want to work. Some people expect someone else to swoop in a help them out. There are many reasons why someone finds themselves in this situation. They have been on a cycle of forever trying to catch up on taxes. It is always the same people in the annual report year after year. Taxes did not go up this year, they went down. You can’t expect miracles. You were not promised miracles.
I agree that we can’t expect miracles, but that’s what First Wind was selling. If you have attended as many town meetings on this subject as I have, you’d probably agree with me. These folks are so desparate to “sell” their projects to us that they’ll say or do anything to convince people to vote “yes” and approve their taxpayer money sucking project. I’ve heard Neil Kiely (the lawyer who is First Wind’s lead front man who starts talking these projects up with the town officers and planning boards a couple of years in advance of the projects coming to light) in town after town make promise after promise of wealth and jobs that would come to the area because of the wind turbine projects. At the first meeting in Carroll regarding the Bowers Mt. project he stood there in front of about 50 townspeople and told them that Maine has a serious problem with high cancer rates and that wind turbines would significantly reduce that problem. HUH?
These developers have no scrupples, no ethics, and care absolutely nothing about what the end results of the project are for Lincoln or any other town. It purely about the big grab for taxpayer money through all of the Federal, state, and local subsidies they are given, but then the real big money comes from the fact that they get to sell carbon credits equivalent to the nameplate capacity of the turbines, even though they only produce an average of 17-21% of that nameplate capacity in actual energy production.
The same developer who preaches clean and green energy every time they open their mouths, turns around and sells those very highly profitable carbon credits to the largest gross polluters in the northeast and elsewhere, so that those companies can continue polluting our air instead of investing in new technology that would eliminate much of . Why is it that people have such a hard time understanding what the real scam here is?
If they would take the hot air from all the anti FW people like bigwind big mouth those wonderful windmills would be producing at 100 per cent. I paid my taxes and I do not work for FW. I think they are just great