https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/26/property-tax-equity-stealing-supreme-court/
Supreme Court justices on Wednesday seemed inclined to side with a 94-year-old woman who said a Minnesota county unfairly pocketed the surplus when it seized and sold her condominium after she failed to pay property taxes.
Hennepin County, which contains Minneapolis, foreclosed on Geraldine Tyler’s one-bedroom condo after she moved into an apartment building for the elderly and stopped paying property taxes for five years.
She owed about $15,000 in taxes and penalties. The county sold her condo for $40,000 and kept the surplus, as the law allows in Minnesota, the District of Columbia and about a dozen other states.
The Supreme Court is considering Tyler’s claim that keeping the excess money violates the Constitution’s prohibition on the taking of private property without fair compensation by the government, as well as protection against excessive fines. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a property-rights group representing Tyler, calls what Hennepin County did “equity-stealing.”
Wednesday’s lengthy oral argument touched on the Magna Carta and the 13th-century Statute of Gloucester and featured more than a dozen references to a colonial-era American judge named St. George Tucker. In the end, however, both conservative and liberal justices seemed less moved by an appeal to history and more worried that there was no limit to the county’s argument that it is entitled to the whole proceeds of a sale when it seizes property because of unpaid taxes.
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“At bottom, she’s saying the county took her property, made a profit on it with the surplus equity, and it belongs to her,” Justice Clarence Thomas said. He asked Washington lawyer Neal K. Katyal, representing Hennepin County, whether he could think of “any instance in which a creditor can . . . seize property and keep the excess profit or the excess amount over the debt that’s actually owed?”
Justice Elena Kagan similarly pushed Katyal. “Are there any limits?” she asked. “I mean, $5,000 tax debt, $5 million house. Take the house, don’t give back the rest?”
She added: “If the mind rebels at the notion that the government can seize your $100,000 bank account and not give you back the $90,000 that you don’t owe, if the mind rebels at that, you know, why should . . . what was going on in 1200 or what was going on in 1776 change anything?”
Katyal said that the Supreme Court had previously blessed a similar law in New York and that Minnesota made it even easier than that law for Tyler and others to avoid forfeiture. He said Tyler ignored five years of warnings about not paying property taxes and other offers of how to restructure payment of what she owed.
