MINTO – The Town of Minto has endorsed a resolution seeking to bring back legislation allowing a municipality to retain surplus proceeds from property subject to a tax sale.
At the April 4 meeting, Minto council supported a resolution from the Town of Essex asking the province to consider previous legislation permitting a municipality to retain surplus proceeds from tax sales.
The Essex resolution notes that prior to being repealed by the Modernizing Ontario’s Municipal Legislation Act in 2017, Section 380(6) of the Municipal Act, 2001 allowed a municipality to retain surplus proceeds from tax sales within their jurisdiction.
The resolution also points out the public tax sale process “is burdensome to a municipality (which) invests a considerable amount of time and money recovering these proceeds” which are then turned over to the provincial treasury.
“When you have a tax sale … say it’s a $100,000 property, $20,000 in taxes, and the 20,000 gets paid and the actual owner never comes forward. Normally the owner gets the surplus,” explained treasurer Gordon Duff.
“So you’d have $80,000 and under the old rules, after a year, that would forfeit to the municipality. This legislation made it forfeit to the Crown.”
While noting a reversion to the previous practice would “probably have minimal effect on the Town of Minto,” Duff said, “This is just another possible revenue stream that’s going back to the province.”
“I’m sure your staff probably put in a lot of time on these tax sales that you don’t get reimbursed for,” said councillor Ed Podniewicz.
“That’s totally true … and you’re exactly right … there’s no compensation for that,” said Duff.
Council passed a motion to receive the correspondence from Essex and directed the clerk to send a letter to all relevant taxation bodies, including the Minister of Municipal Affairs, Minister of Finance, Wellington County Council, Perth-Wellington MPP Matthew Ray, and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.
The letter will urge them to reinstate previous legislation that permitted a municipality to apply for and retain the surplus proceeds from a tax sale in its jurisdiction.
