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Pre-Election Threat: We’ll Take Your Homes

by Paul Bass | Sep 26, 2005 2:11 pm

(2) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: City Hall, Politics, The Heights

When Neftali Arroyo (above) arrived home, his son exclaimed, “Daddy! We're going to lose the house!”
Did City Hall use its tax office as a political weapon? That’s what families on Mountain Top Lane wonder after the city sued them for foreclosure on back taxes on what they thought was a city-owned street. A sheriff served them foreclosure notices just four days before this month’s Democratic primary, in which City Hall targeted the neighbors’ alderwoman for defeat. A coincidence, say city officials.

To the neighbors, the story got fishier right after the primary election. The city put the foreclosures on hold. And the city’s legislative office received a voice-mail message from a City Hall-hired lawyer that raised questions about the timing of the suit.

Was City Hall using its tax office to cause problems for an opponent at the polls? Or was this, as city officials claim, a combination of unrelated events and bureaucratic miscommunication?

“Daddy! We’re Going to Lose the House!”

Mountain Top Lane is a 15-year-old block of six spacious two-story houses way at the crest of a hill on the east end of town, in Fair Haven Heights. It’s quiet, clean, peaceful, a continuation of another quiet street cut into the woods. Working- and middle-class families own the homes.

At least some of the homeowners were supporters of Alderwoman Rosa Santana. Santana is allied with opponents to the administration of Mayor John DeStefano. She faced a tough challenge in a Sept. 13 primary from a well-funded candidate supported by City Hall. Indeed, that City Hall-backed challenger beat her decisively.

Four days earlier, on Friday, Sept. 9, a sheriff showed up at all six Mountain Top Lane homes with papers notifying the six families that the city is foreclosing on their homes because they owe back taxes. The taxes weren’t on their houses. They were on the street that runs in the middle of their houses. The families were shocked. They say they’d never heard before about their owning or owing taxes on the street. And these were serious bills they were now discovering they collectively owe: a total of $6,924.81. The debts date back to 1998.

Neftali Arroyo came home that afternoon to find his 12-year-old son in a vexed state.

“Daddy!” his son, Neftali, Jr., greeted him. “We’re going to lose the house!”

“Hold on a second,” said dad. What happened?

“We have a lawsuit.”

Arroyo, who does drawings for architect Wendell Harp’s firm for a living, has lived on Mountain Top Lane for five years. He supports Rosa Santana. This was the first, he said, that the city had ever notified him about a back tax bill for owning a sliver of the road.

“We know we need to pay,” reasoned a neighbor, Josefina Santaniello, who’s a custodian at Southern Connecticut State University. “But no letter [before now]. No nothing. Why?”

Samuel Anderson, shown on the way to taking his son David to school, calls the city action “outrageous.”

Samuel Anderson, another neighbor and a maintenance supervisor at the APT Foundation, also asked “Why? Why now? I think it’s outrageous. The whole community got together. We sat and talked about it. Everyone in their own mind suspected” the timing had to do with the primary election.

So did Alderwoman Santana. She wrote in a Sept. 19 letter to the neighbors that she is “concerned by the timing of this event coming just before the —primary elections.” (Santana failed to return repeated phone calls for comment from the Independent.)

And guess what? After Santana lost the election, the city put the foreclosure lawsuits on hold. It told the neighbors: Never mind. We won’t go after your houses. For now, anyway.

Tracking Who Gave the Orders

Santana’s letter includes a transcription of a phone message left at the Office of Legislative Services by the private attorney hired to file the suit:

“This is regarding a tax foreclosure that we’re handling for the City of New Haven and I guess you had some inquiries from the constituents.

“I took a look at it. [T]his is a file that we’ve had for quite some time, the City has had for a period two plus years, instructed us not to proceed.

“We recently received instruction to proceed, filed a writ, and I know that a number of complaints have got back to Maureen Villani [of the city tax office] and others.

“I guess there is some discrepancy between the tax assessor, collector, et al, and the property owners as to whether or not there are bills outstanding, or whether they have been paid in full or what have you.

“We have been instructed yet again now that we’ve served the complaints to not proceed any further until all this gets reconciled.

“So the person that you might want to follow up with is Maureen Villani. She’s the one in the tax collector’s office that we really take our instructions from.”

Ignorance is No Excuse

Maureen Villani didn’t return calls for comment from the Independent. Her boss, Tax Collector C.J. Cuticello, did discuss the matter.

“It has nothing to do with Rosa Santana or anything else,” Cuticello said. As an old debt, it went to a private collection agency the city hires, J.E. Roberts. Sept. 9 just happened to be the day neighbors were notified of a suit that was long in the making, Cuticello said.

The homeowners on Mountain Top Lane should have known they owed taxes, according to Cuticello, because their lawyers would have shown them where their property lines end at the time of their closings.

They may not have received bills because the bills went to only one homeowner in care of all the others, Cuticello said. But he said that’s no excuse for them not knowing about the debt. Their neighbor most certainly should have told them at some point if he received a bill, he argued. “It’s not a huge street. Everyone lives on this right of way.” He said homeowners have a legal obligation under Connecticut law to know about tax debts on their property, whether or not they personally receive a notice.

Another reason the neighbors may have been confused or left in the dark: Mountain Top Lane developer Kelly Development, Inc., owned two-ninths of the road. It couldn’t sell some of the land because it was unbuildable. So Kelly Development dropped out of the picture, and the city foreclosed on it.

The street used to be unpaved and rocky. Three and a half years ago the neighbors convinced the city to pave it. And the city agreed to make it a public street, according to public works chief Richard Miller.

“The paperwork never gets down to the right people,” Miller said Monday. He said the Board of Aldermen approved the street paving in April 2002. The job was done by December. “What didn’t happen was that the acceptance of this street didn’t get recorded as an accepted street.”

Miller said his office has contacted the tax office to straighten out the paperwork. Still, the neighbors will remain responsible for the taxes prior to 2002, said Tax Collector Cuticello. Which suggests that, politics aside, the saga of Mountain Top Lane has not ended yet.

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Comments

posted by: Jon-Jay Tilsen on September 27, 2005  10:36am

It seems a little paranoid to interpret the City’s action as an election-related threat.  If politicians used such a threat against me, it would make me vote against them, not for them.  I will be surprised if there is really a conspiracy here.  More likely, chock it up to an administrative screw-up.

posted by: sandstorm on September 28, 2005  9:27am

There is no paranoia; there is the man
“who would be king”.He is well known for
intolerance of less than full support on all
issues and for retribution for failure
to support him and all of his initiatives.

He has many strengths, but accepting criticism
is not one of them!

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