In the Tax Collector's Office in Water- bury, Conn., there's a box about the size of a file cabinet drawer. It weighs roughly 50 pounds and is filled with accordion-folded printouts of delinquent real estate, auto and personal property tax bills totaling almost $55 million. That's roughly a million dollars per pound of good stories in this city, where a fiscal crisis forced a state takeover of the budget process last year.
The Republican-American has covered news of the city's budgetary woes as it developed: the liens that were sold to a company that itself went bankrupt; the contract and pension disputes; the state's oversight board. The city, which is facing a staggering two-year deficit of about $75 million, received so much state aid this legislative session that one lawmaker jokingly referred to the collection of provisions as "Waterbury welfare." Unanswered questions Several questions kept nagging readers - and the publisher and editors - of this family-owned paper: How much did the delinquent taxes contribute to the money pit, and would the city be solvent if it could collect all the outstanding debt?
We decided to obtain a list of the delinquent taxpayers, analyze it, and publish it in a format that people could understand. Better yet, who are the deadbeats? Inquiring minds want to know. We decided to obtain a list of the delinquent taxpayers, analyze it, and publish it in a format that people could understand. The result was a June 17 cover story by investigative reporter Darlene McCormick and a six-page special section that ran in the city and suburban editions on June 17.
Among her findings: The top 10 real estate debtors combined owed more than $6.4 million but the city is unlikely to collect any of that soon because of court actions, environmental issues, and the sale of liens. The property that showed the biggest outstanding debt - $1.3 million in bills going back to 1985 - was sold that year to the state, and meanwhile all the bills were going to the wrong place.
A large part of the problem was poor record-keeping by the city. The special section listed some of the delinquent taxpayers and how much they owe, based on records the Tax Collector's Office at City Hall gave to the newspaper in March. Naming names We published the names of 2,159 of the more than 9,000 delinquent payers of real estate taxes only. Delinquencies on personal property, such as business equipment and fixtures, or on motor vehicles were not included because real estate makes up more than half the outstanding balance and is much easier to track.
Months of research went into formatting the records we received from the city. The list covered a 15-year period from 1985 to 1999 and reflected all payments made through March 22, 2001. The newspaper requested and received names and amounts of every delinquent, even if they owed a nickel. Because of space limitations, only delinquents who owed $1,000 or more on real estate were listed in the paper.
Also, most delinquents owing less than $1,000 owed only for the 1999 supplemental assessment or owed taxes on properties of very little value. The project started last summer, when the newspaper first requested a list of delinquent taxpayers for analysis. The data the city provided then went back only a few years. It was not enough to publish a full and accurate list, but was enough to help uncover some of the problem spots in the system.
The newspaper made its second request in February, this time intending to get a full list for analysis and possible publication. The Tax Collector's Office was willing to cooperate, but asked if we could wait until the end of March because it was swamped with a wave of payments from January bills. We agreed. We asked for all data available on delinquent tax bills, going as far back as possible. Computerized records of tax bills are available back to 1982.
On March 23, the tax collector's office exported this data, reflecting all payments made through March 22, into four Excel spreadsheets - one for real estate property, one for business fixtures subject to personal property tax, one for motor vehicles through 1998, and one for motor vehicle bills delinquent from the 1999 regular and supplemental levies. We decided to concentrate on the real estate list.
Using Excel, we sorted the spreadsheet data by map, block and lot number and ran subtotals for each of the 9,354 delinquent properties. First, we had to clean the data because the information we wanted to publish - the owner's name - was spread out over two fields in the spreadsheet. This had to be searched and checked manually to ensure consistency, and this step was done over the course of a week.
The real estate property tax list consisted of more than 30,000 bills going back as far as 1982, listing taxpayers alphabetically. At first this seemed to be exactly what was needed; we could search for a name, group all the outstanding bills and subtotal them. We discovered it wasn't that simple. When we checked on the name of one businessman on the oversight board, for example, we found a large outstanding balance.
When we double-checked with the taxpayer and the city tax records, however, we found that he had sold the property listed in his name and had paid the remainder of his taxes. This made it clear we had to sort first by some unique key for the property-we chose map, block and lot number and find a sub-total for each property. Then we'd needed to identify the last known owner listed for that property.
Using Excel, we sorted the spreadsheet data by map, block and lot number and ran subtotals for each of the 9,354 delinquent properties. Then we copied the owner's name from the last 1999 listing for each of the properties. This step, plus editing the names again for consistency and typographical errors, took more than a week. The backbone We then opened the Excel 2000 spreadsheet, with records for each bill and subtotals for each property, into a Word 2000 table.
This allowed us to run a macro that edited out the individual bill records, leaving only the subtotals for each property. We saved this document as a text file and opened it in Access 2000 to give us a working database of the outstanding debt for each property. This database created the Top 25 properties list and formed the backbone for the delinquent properties database that was published on the Web site.
That got us only halfway to the list in the special section, which provided combined totals for each taxpayer (because many own more than one property). Shifting software To get that result, we took the properties list, sorted it alphabetically by owner in Access, and saved the result as a text file. We opened that table in Excel, subtotaled it by owner, and saved the result as a text file. That table included individual property balances and the subtotals by owner.
We then imported that text file into Word 6.0 for publication. We used Word to change the names from all-capital letters to Title Case, and to clean up known errors. Some long names may have been truncated or shortened in moving the tables from Excel into Access; otherwise, spellings and listings are in the format originally provided by the tax collector. Work turning the spreadsheet into the list took about three weeks.
Only after it was done did we discover that under state law, bills that have been outstanding more than 15 years are not recoverable. We went back to the original spreadsheet to identify the 54 properties that were delinquent that far back, subtotaled the outstanding debts from 1982-84 for each, and manually subtracted those sums from the final list. In the week afterward, hundreds of complaints filtered into the city's tax office and the newspaper, but city officials said few who owed taxes paid their bills.
Most complaints came from those who said they didn't owe because their property had been sold, but they were still listed as the owner. Others said they paid their bills after March 22, the cutoff date for publication. Then there were those who admitted owing back taxes, but complained that the newspaper had no business printing their names. Howard Fielding can be reached by e-mail at hfielding@rep-am.com.