MILLINOCKET, Maine — The town has issued 252 liens this month as part of efforts to collect more than $300,000 in overdue property taxes, continuing a trend of delinquency that has officials concerned, Town Manager John Davis said Thursday.
The town put liens on 304 properties in 2014. Officials did not know Thursday how many of the most recent liens were repeats from last year.
The owners whose properties had liens attached in July have 18 months to pay up before the town can assume ownership of the properties, the majority of which are homes.
Exactly why the owners are more than a year behind in their taxes is something of a mystery, Town Council Chairman Richard Angotti Jr. said.
“We understand that there is a percentage of those [property owners] who are down on their luck, and a percentage that has walked away from their properties, but there are some who can pay and just aren’t,” Angotti said Thursday. “A lot of those people can pay.”
The tax-delinquent properties are part of a downward spiral the town’s finances have fallen into since at least summer 2013, when then-Town Manager Peggy Daigle made sales of tax-acquired properties a priority to help offset a cash-flow shortage that threatened the town’s credit rating.
The number of tax-delinquent properties is significant. Millinocket had 4,466 residents and 2,155 homes in 2014, according to suburbanstats.org, which uses Census data to track residential and population trends in the U.S.
The town has assumed ownership of about 97 properties through the tax foreclosure process since 2012, according to numbers compiled in March. Davis, who became town manager in April, said he didn’t have an up-to-date list of foreclosed properties or detailed information on the 252 liens, and Town Treasurer Peggy Elliott is on vacation this week.
The liens, Angotti said, underline a fundamental problem the town has had since its largest single employer, a paper mill, closed in 2008, taking about 175 jobs with it. It needs a strong dose of economic development.
Town officials met Thursday with Jonathan LaBonte, director of the Governor’s Office of Policy and Management, to discuss economic development ideas, Davis said.
A staffer for U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin also met Thursday with council members and local groups as part of a community and economic development outreach effort, councilors said.
The council met in executive session on Thursday to discuss what its agenda described as a “tax abatement matter.” Under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, property tax abatements are among the subjects that can be discussed behind closed doors.
When asked if the matter concerned Cate Street Capital or the companies the New Hampshire investor created, Davis and councilors declined to comment.
Cate Street Capital Inc. and two corporate entities it created when it bought the Katahdin Avenue paper mill in 2011 — GNP Holdings II and GNP West Inc. — were granted a tax abatement of about $356,541 for the 2014-15 fiscal year, which ended June 30. They originally sought an abatement of $1.23 million, officials have said.
It was unclear Thursday whether Cate Street or its entities had paid the approximately $1 million the three companies owed as of Jan. 20. Davis and Angotti declined to comment.
Exactly how to offset the loss of taxes represented by the latest liens, or how to develop the region’s economy, remains undetermined. Angotti declared economic development a council priority on July 16, the day councilors passed town and school budgets that produced a $29.63 property tax rate, slightly higher than the previous budget’s $29.60 rate.
A property tax rate over $30 would make economic development all but impossible, Angotti has said.
“It is going to take everybody working together to do economic development here,” Angotti said. “If you know somebody looking to expand or move [into the area], we are open for business.”
The best thing town officials can do for tax collections, Angotti said, is hope that more people start paying their bills on time.