Baltimore City sued by community group over tax sale practices
BALTIMORE – A lawsuit filed this week against Baltimore City hopes to change the way the city conducts its annual property tax sale.
"Your tax sale is not a property sale, yet in many cases, it's acting like one," said Jonathan Sacks, from the Edmondson Community Organization.
Maryland Legal Aid joined Sacks and other neighbors Tuesday after the lawsuit was filed in federal court, alleging the city's tax sale system is predatory and unconstitutional.
"Your extractive, tangled-title creating, long-term vacancy spreading, community-destroying tax sale is going to be over with this case," Sacks said.
The event announcing the lawsuit on Tuesday was held outside the former Edmondson Community Organization building on Edmondson Avenue, which the E.C.O. lost in 2018 to tax sale.
The tax sale system is a tool for the city to recover lost revenue and try to control its long-running vacant building problem.
Midtown-Edmondson is among the neighborhoods in Baltimore most plagued by blight.
The city's dashboard on vacant and abandoned buildings lists 360 Vacant Building Notices in the West Baltimore neighborhood.
The community organization says about half its homes are vacant, and it argues the city's tax sale system benefits outside investors at the expense of longtime residents.
"That works for the city, but it's catastrophic to the Baltimoreans who lose their properties for pennies on the dollar," Maryland Legal Aid's Lee Ogburn said. "The tax sale is a rounding error for the city. But, it's not a rounding error for its residents, principally low-income people, principally people of color, who lose their homes."
The lawsuit contends the tax sale, usually held in May, makes up about $12 million, "less than three-thousandths of one percent" of the city budget.
WJZ reached out to the mayor's office and, as of Wednesday afternoon, had no comment on the pending lawsuit.
