Let's stop doing business with tax bill deadbeats

An editorial in this morning’s Oshkosh Northwestern connected the dots between some local developers and some of the city’s biggest property tax deadbeats. For those of us who have followed city politics for any length of time, the realization that these people are often one and the same, comes as no surprise. Some names change from year to year while others stay the same, but the fact nonetheless exists that some local developers refuse to pay their property taxes until the last possible moment, saving their properties just before they’re foreclosed on.

The delinquencies are bad enough, but what’s even more insulting is the fact that some of these deadbeats are developers who have gotten tax-incremental financing money from the city to do those projects (or others) in the first place. I have said for years that governmental bodies should stop doing business with tax bill deadbeats. If the rest of us can pay our taxes, surely they can pay theirs. I think it takes some major brass to not pay your taxes on the one hand, then turn around and hold out your other hand for development assistance from the very community you’re stiffing. Yes, I know the county pays the city its portion of the taxes and then collects on it (or tries) from the deadbeats, but that’s just number juggling. No matter how you slice it, it’s still money our community at large doesn’t have that it is owed. I don’t know if an ordinance can legally be drafted, or if it just needs to be something elected officials resolve to do from a moral and ethical standpoint, but I believe it is high time that the people in elected office stop approving development deals for people who develop properties and then are not only delinquent in paying their taxes, but apparently have no shame in being so.