Scranton will hold its second consecutive annual tax sale on Monday, June 3.
Called a treasurer's sale, the tax sale, scheduled for 10 a.m. at City Hall, is for delinquent taxes from 2010, city Treasurer Christopher Boland said.
This tax sale follows a similar one held last June of delinquent taxes from 2004-09 as the city attempts to catch up with delinquencies by regularly holding tax sales, he said.
"We're going to make it an annual thing, which is good," Mr. Boland said.
The June 3 tax sale encompasses 452 properties owing a total of $960,513, he said. The delinquencies range from a few hundred dollars to nearly $48,000, according to the first of a few public notices for the sale published Monday in The Times-Tribune. The tax sale is only for 2010 delinquencies because of a routine lag in when the city receives delinquencies from the Single Tax Office, Mr. Boland said.
Delinquent taxpayers could avoid the June 3 tax sale by paying beforehand or entering into an agreement with the city to pay the taxes, he said.
Before the June 2012 tax sale, the city had last held a tax sale in 1998. Over at least the past two decades, the city had contracted with private firms that collected delinquent taxes with varying degrees of success, and tax sales had not been regularly held.
With 25,787 assessable properties in the city, last year's tax sale encompassed 1,970 delinquent properties totaling $4.1 million owed from 2004-09, officials had said.
In that sale, the city collected $1.27 million before the sale from people paying delinquent taxes, and on the day of the sale collected $25,280 in back taxes through the sale of 19 properties, officials said. The city ended up netting $1.04 million from last year's tax sale after deducting the commission of Northeast Revenue Service, a company hired by the city in 2011 to create a system to collect back taxes under the Municipal Claims and Tax Lien Act.
A 2010 estimate showed that the city failed to collect about $11 million in delinquent property taxes, some of which at the time had gone unpaid for as long as 64 years. However, some unpaid taxes might never be recovered, as many delinquencies are on vacant land or owed by absentee landowners or defunct companies, such as orphan coal-mining firms, officials have said.
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