March 29, 2024
Archive

Foreclosure notices double in Millinocket

MILLINOCKET – It’s a troubling sign of the times: Town officials have mailed 56 foreclosure notices seeking delinquent property tax payments and 256 lien notices for late sewer bills.

Although some landowners have already answered the notices with payments, both numbers are town records, tax collector Lorene Cyr said. The notices went out almost three weeks ago.

“We have probably doubled foreclosure notices this year,” Cyr said. “That’s a lot. A few years ago, we might have had just five or six.”

If payments or payment arrangements are not made by April 7, the town could become owner of several private properties and then face the challenge of working with the owners of the properties to settle the bills or pursuing harsher means to collect the money, Town Manager Eugene Conlogue and tax collector Lorene Cyr said.

“People are obviously having more difficulty paying their bills,” Conlogue said Tuesday.

Conlogue blamed the increase on runaway heating oil, gasoline and other energy costs and on the continuing impact of the late 2002 shutdown, and 2003 bankruptcy, of Great Northern Paper Co., the Katahdin region’s primary employer and owner of mills in East Millinocket and Millinocket.

The mills reopened in 2003 as Katahdin Paper Co. LLC, but with a fraction of the people they once employed.

“They are paying things they must pay immediately,” Conlogue said of those residents in arrears. “Sewer bills are not among those things.”

With the sewer bills, residents have 30 days to pay what they owe or the town can attach a lien to their property, Cyr said.

Residents have 45 days to pay on the foreclosure warnings before town officials can begin foreclosure procedures, Cyr said.

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

794-8215


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like