Travis County Commissioners Court
October 2, 2007
Item 30
>> let's get our tax assessors, then we'll go to the parks department. Number 30 is receive end of year collections report and take appropriate action.
>> good morning, judge and Commissioners.
>> good morning.
>> good morning.
>> on July 3rd, I came to Commissioners court and reported to you the collections as of that date. Today I want to follow up with our year-end collections. The end of the fiscal year having just ended. On July 1st we had 20,253 delinquent taxpayers owing $34 million. In delinquent taxes for the tax year 2006. As of September 30th this year, we had 15,208 delinquent taxpayers owing $22 million. An additional 5,045 taxpayers have paid in full with payments of $12 million for the 2006 tax year since July 1st. If the county were using a private attorney to collect delinquent taxes, these same taxpayers would have had to pay an additional $2.4 million in attorney fees in the last three months of our fiscal year. Or the taxing entities may have seen $2.4 million less. This year we filed 605 lathes. These were extreme cases that refused to pay their taxes. Some of these cases may result in taken to foreclosure. 49 paid in full -- excuse me. This year we advertised 408 properties for foreclosure sale. 49 paid in full before the tax sale. 103 were pulled from the tax sale due to legal reasons such as bankruptcy or the owner made payment arrangements. 169 properties were sold and 87 were bid off or struck off to the county. Not one of the sold properties was a homestead. No homeowner anywhere in Travis County had their home taken from them as result of delinquent property taxes. For the 2006 tax year, 345,000 properties are paid in full. These properties paid $1.8 billion. Again, that's billion, b as in boy. Another 4,165 have made partial payments of $8 million. We ended the year at 98.98% collected. We missed our target of 99% for Travis County by just $70,000. We did collect $334 million and refunded $1.5 million as a result of appraisal district adjustments. This morning we passed the 99% mark and made our target, but two days late. 98.98% is the second highest collection rate for Travis County ever. And 605 lawsuits is the lowest lawsuit filing on record. Prior year delinquent collections ended up $156,000 over last year at $2,637,539. County court fine and fee collections have 4,648 new cases and total collections of $2.5 million. Jp court fine and fees, collections had 28,315 new cases. Total collections of $1.3 million. Staff and I are pleased to provide you with this information and we'll answer any questions you may have.
>> nelda, what is the average fee that is charged to folks on lawsuits?
>> average fee?
>> average, more or less.
>> it's the percentage of what they owe. 15% of what they owe. With the public attorney it's 15% of what they owe.
>> so there's no average, per se?
>> no, they vary from high to low.
>> so do we have the -- the j.p.s, that figure was $1.3 million. That figure was in '07?
>> that is by the end of f.y. '07.
>> so how does that compare to 2006, or do we know?
>> I don't have the '06 figure in front of me. I can provide you with that.
>> I would be interested to know.
>> we finished about a million dollars for the previous year, but it wasn't a full year so this is -- we're about all the same
>> [inaudible].
>> okay. Does that include the central selection efforts out at jp 3?
>> yes. From the third parties, yes.
>> right. Okay. Yeah, it would be good to have that.
>> we'll be happy to get it to you.
>> good information. Questions?
>> the only other thing was on the 87 properties that were struck off to the county, then what do we do with those?
>> you can sell them. You can sell them through a sealed bid process which is in place or some other method, but it's at the court's discretion at this point as to what happens with those 87 properties. The county -- you are holding those properties in trust.
>> those are the ones we're holding for 15, 25 years?
>> those are ones we consider in executive session and come out and
>> [inaudible]. One of those was a property that we -- by the oak hill y that we had this little controversy list.
>> so that's part of the list that are struck off.
>> they are listed on the tax office website for people to see. There's a bid process for those. We have in the lago vista area, we had school had retained real estate agents to attempt to sell these properties. I don't think that was very successful, but we have tried numerous different ways to get the word out and get these properties sold. That have been struck off.
>> nelda, would you be able to maybe by the end of the year, not knowing what the other urban counties, let's say with take the top 10 urban counties, we know most of them are done privately versus what we do. Would that be easy enough for you all to put that together and give it to us and show the top 10 counties and what their collection rates were? It would just be nice to have that in front of you when people started asking you about that. Is that -- even though they are done -- we do know that most of them, maybe all of them are done privately. Is that something you all would have access to?
>> we could get it.
>> we can attempt to get it. As you've gone through these processes before, we've had troubles getting accurate numbers and sometimes the tax assessor didn't want to say what their collection numbers were. We have picked it up in their
>> [inaudible] that's reported by auditors. If that's good enough numbers, we can get it from the caffers from the different numbers the auditors have prepared.
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, October 3, 2007, 18:30 AM