To the highest bidder go the spoils, as West Nipissing is selling off thirteen parcels of land. The owners have fallen behind on their municipal taxes, so the town is putting them on the sales block, and you can make your bid until 3 p.m. on Monday, September 23rd.
Those bids must arrive at the Municipal Office, 101-225 Holditch Street in Sturgeon Falls by that date and time. For the complete list of land available, visit the municipality’s website.
Mayor Kathleen Rochon emphasized that the sale of properties in extreme tax arrears happens every year, and the sales “are more an administrative function as opposed to some of the other properties that we have declared surplus.”
For example, last year the municipality declared Cache Bay Trailer Park surplus to the municipality’s needs and sold it for $761,000. Selling surplus land is similar to tax sales. A notice is posted, bids come in, and those bids are opened in public by municipal staff. The highest bid becomes the proud owner.
See: West Nipissing sells Cache Bay Trailer park
There are no surplus properties for sale now – only tax sales at the moment – but the municipality is always keeping an eye on the land it owns and reevaluating the land’s use to the town and the people.
“The people’s use of land changes,” Mayor Rochon noted. She offered as an example the two ball diamonds in Cache Bay which are rarely used. Field has a diamond, there are three in Sturgeon Falls, and one in Springer, so in time, those lesser used properties will be discussed by council, and overtime, a lesser used field could be declared surplus, as an example. Same goes for all municipal land, the use value changes over time.
“When facilities remain unused or generally unused, the municipality is still responsible for maintaining the land,” and keeping up the property, Mayor Rochon added. “So, our council is trying to be a little more strategic because every piece of land we own we have to maintain.”
Which costs taxpayers, so “if there’s not a benefit to the taxpayers, and if the land is not being used, then it’s not a good investment of taxpayer dollars as far as maintenance is concerned.”
Whether it’s a surplus land sale or a tax sale, all money made from selling land goes into a dedicated reserve. “We didn’t want it to go into a general operational fund,” the mayor said, “we have a lot of buildings, parks and land that need money invested in them, so the money from any property sales goes into a separate reserve set aside for strategic investments in those assets that really have good value to the community.”
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.
