Municipality decides what’s best for leftover land

If you don’t pay your land taxes, eventually the town comes knocking to seize your land. But sometimes those properties aren’t so easy to get rid of.

West Nipissing is going through that process now. Earlier this fall, the municipality listed a handful of properties in a tax sale, but eight of those properties remain unsold, which wasn’t a surprise to staff.

Alisa Craddock, the director of corporate services, noted “We did expect that they would not all sell, because they have some issues surrounding them.” Indeed, some are landlocked, some are too small to build upon, and one was the site of an old gas station.

What to do? Craddock outlined three options. The municipality can do nothing and “taxes will continue to be levied against the property.”

The municipality can also take possession of the property within two years of a failed tax sale. Craddock noted in her report that with this option, “The taxes are written off, the property becomes a municipal asset, and no further taxes are levied on the property.”

Option three is to try to sell the property as a tax sale again within two years.

As per Ontario’s Municipal Act, if you don’t pay your taxes for three calendar years, the municipality will notify you, and if you neglect to pay those back taxes within the year, it will then be sold.

See: West Nipissing is taking tenders for tax sale lands

As for the eight unsold properties, council decided to take over a few. There’s a little slip of land on the north side of the Sturgeon Falls National Cemetery, just left of the outbuilding. It’s just under one-tenth of an acre, and nobody bid on the piece.

There’s also a landlocked parcel in the woods off Parker Street. It’s about 1,800 square feet and sits adjacent to property owned by the municipality, so council decided to take that over. Again, there were no bidders interested.

Same for three properties at 69 Waterfront Dr., in Cache Bay. The municipality will investigate these parcels, gather more information about what it could be taking on, and then decide what to do with them.

Council also wants more information about the old gas station in Field, near the intersection of Desjardins and Larocque Streets. There is the building itself, and some small parcels nearby. Most of the surrounding land the municipality already owns through tax arrears, but before taking where the station sits, council wants to learn what lies beneath.

Additional information will be brought back to council, which will then decide what do to with parcels. The complete listings of leftover land can be found on the municipality’s website.

David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.