Lex Fori, PLLC and Carson J. Tucker recently filed a brief in the Court of Appeals seeking to overturn a property tax foreclosure in which a contracted third-party was sending notices of the tax foreclosure proceedings to a post office box which was no longer in operation. The contractor had access to the property owner’s proper home address, as did the County Treasurer, yet, the only “notice” that was sent to our client regarding the tax foreclosure proceedings was the judgment, by which time it was too late to redeem the property.
Interesting sub-issues in this case have to do with challenging the constitutionality of taking private property for a failure of the property owner to pay a single year’s property tax bill of a couple thousand dollars, and yet allowing the county to resell the property taken on the open market for a windfall – taking the value of the property without compensation or any reimbursement to the property owner. In this case, several parcels and lake front property were taken this way and sold where the client had maintained this property for decades making the coefficient between the tax bill and the value of the property extremely high.
Read the brief here: Mitchell.Brief.on.Appeal.01.17.2020