The South Burnett Regional Council will begin collection proceedings against 43 properties which are three or more years behind in their rates payments.
At Wednesday’s Council meeting, Council officers tabled a list of properties that will be actioned.
Unless the owners enter into an arrangement with the Council to pay the outstanding rates or charges, the properties will be put to auction.
However, this process could take as long as a year.
The last time the Council tabled a similar list was almost three years ago at its October 2012 meeting.
That list also covered 43 properties.
But between the time that list was tabled and February 2014, when the properties came up for auction, about 40 per cent of owners had entered into repayment arrangements.
And in the end only about 20 properties – most of them vacant land – went under the hammer.
Finance portfolio chairman Cr Keith Campbell said he would like to see as few properties come up for auction as possible.
“I urge ratepayers who are in this situation to call Council on (07) 4189-9100 to make an arrangement to pay the rates within a satisfactory time frame,” Cr Campbell said.
“This is very important because if the properties go to sale then Council is obliged under the Local Government Act to set a reserve price for them that equals either the unimproved value or the outstanding rates, whichever is higher.
“This could result in a very significant loss of capital value for the ratepayer, especially if the property has improvements on it such as a dwelling or other type of building.”
Mayor Wayne Kratzmann agreed the situation was “very unfortunate”.
“I worked in local government myself and I know that while Councils have the legal authority to seize and sell a ratepayer’s property to recover overdue rates, it’s an unhappy situation that everyone would prefer to avoid,” he said.
The Mayor said when properties were seized, most defaulters lost heavily on the deal.
He knew that some of the properties in question had houses on them.
This meant ratepayers would be losing their homes as well as their land if they failed to act before proceedings began.
The only bright spot he could see in the current situation was that despite the region being in “economic doldrums” for most of the last three years, and many primary producers being impacted by the 2013 floods and the drought that followed, there had been no increase in the default rate.
“Extreme defaulters represent only a very small percentage of the almost 18,000 rate notices Council issues,” Mayor Kratzmann said.
“They’re about one fifth of one per cent.”
All Councils are obliged under the Local Government Act to take recovery action on unpaid rates.
