From Brian Lockhart, CT Post:
The tax department in City Hall oversees a car towing operation which officials maintain earns little to no money.
“Most of those cars really are junkers,” Mayor Bill Finch’s Finance Director, Anne Kelly-Lenz, said recently about the motor vehicles that are seized for back taxes, sit unclaimed, and are eventually auctioned off or scrapped by the towing operations.
Meanwhile, across the street, the police department is being paid $376 by Jim’s Autobody for every abandoned car that wrecking company hauls off and disposes of for the cops.
“It doesn’t make sense,” City Councilwoman Eneida Martinez, D-139, told Hearst Connecticut Media when the newspaper informed her about the two practices. “Why can’t the tax office do the same thing?”
Full story here.
As the heading indicates, a department that generates expense to collect taxes with four notices might be expected to identify and pursue situations where there seemed to be expense but no return to the City. Of course a critic might also observe there are likely fewer than 200 revenue items including Copies, Line Item 41538 of significance raised locally. The boot is more easily noticed by residents of Bridgeport than diskette fees in the Registrar’s office. So why have there been no questions about revenue from booting in budget sessions over the years? Do Council persons really consider tax funds are revenues from voters and business owners and are dear to those people? Do Council members sweat their decision making or are they happy to accept what Tom Sherwood is prepared to suggest before he goes home to Fairfield (where the Finance process is much different from Bridgeport’s)? Time will tell.
If people had even a quasi fair job, they would pay their tax. Jobs come second though to kickbacks from and to those who make political appointments.
“Most of those cars really are junkers,” Mayor Bill Finch’s Finance Director, Anne Kelly-Lenz, said recently about the motor vehicles that are seized for back taxes.
How dare they be so presumptuous as to classify someone’s only means to get to work as a junker and not worthy of the streets of Bridgeport? Sometimes a junker is all you can afford, or at least I remember it that way.
Right on, Donald!
As for our city employees who are given non-emergency vehicles as part of their official duties, how about they be issued “junkers” or, better still, no cars at all?
“Most of those cars really are junkers,” Mayor Bill Finch’s Finance Director, Anne Kelly-Lenz, said recently about the motor vehicles that are seized for back taxes.
And most of Bill Finch’s staff is full of shit.
Something else that is fishy at the Tax Office is the delinquent tax letters. I just received a letter from TaxServ, the city’s vendor for tax collection stating I owed for 2013. The problem is, I never received the tax bill for 2013 in the first place. I talked to some friends, and they have had the same experience.
Looks like the city is trying to grease the palms of all their vendors with the Tax Collector.
Did anyone else read the entire article?
“[Valentino’s] arrest has raised questions about oversight of the murky world of booting, towing and scrapping cars, particularly since Bridgeport’s tax collector, according to Valentino’s arrest warrant, told investigators “proceeds from tax tows and tax auctions rarely return to the city because storage fees usually outweigh the value of the vehicle.”
What that means is the towing companies and the marshals tell the city that, however the car is disposed of, there is just enough left over for them, and the city takes their word for it.
“We get reports,” Kelly-Lenz told the Ordinance Committee last week, adding, “Are we meant to police every vendor that we hire?”
No, you are supposed to collect taxes. If the towing companies and the judicial marshal’s office is making all the money, what is the point of the program?