CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The legal arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called for Cuyahoga County to stop bundling and auctioning off its property tax liens to outside debt collection firms.

In a March 3 letter to county officials, two attorneys for the New York-based NAACP's Legal Defense Fund said the practice of selling tax liens "unfairly" deprives people of their property and has a disproportionate impact on black communities. They cited arecent investigative series by the Washington Post that criticized the business practices of Aeon Financial, a company that has purchased tax liens in Cuyahoga County. 

Gus Frangoes never called me. I do, however, understand Jim Rokakis' oft-handed comments. 

 

  

 

I wrote him a letter in 2006 asking that he not sell anymore properties through third-party tax lien sales to GLS Capital and Plymouth Park Investments out of East Cleveland. Mayor Frank Jackson had also asked him not to sell tax liens from Cleveland. 

  

I was critical of Rokakis pushing this blight-causing deal in 1999 when I hosted a radio show on WERE. I think it's absolutely horrible how he, as an elected official, pushed for a tax lien sale state law that created blight in East Cleveland by letting third party investors sit on vacant properties without cutting the grass, boarding them up, maintaining or rehabilitating them. If Steve Litt wants to write a real story, investigate Rokakis' third party tax lien sales and the impact they've had on school district budgets. He claimed it helps the schools but empty houses don't generate property taxes. Rokakis' policies have done much to decimate the East Cleveland school district's budget and that of every other community in Cuyahoga County where he's been selling tax liens to third party investors.

 

   

I had some blocks with 37 properties and 25 delapidated vacancies. Every year we had to divert general fund and HUD dollars from other purposes just to take care of abandoned properties. Go to Rokakis' website. He won't update the "tax lien certificate sales" information past 2006 because it will show just how his policies have devasted the county. Through 2006 it shows he sold the tax liens to 22912 properties from East Cleveland, Cleveland and other cities throughout the county. How many tax liens has Rokakis sold over the past four years? That's the number he's hiding from the public. He has refused to allow the individual tax delinquent homeowner to buy their own tax lien at up to a 30 percent discount, but he sells their tax lien to a third-party for that amount. Steve Litt. This is the real story.

   

 

I did not automatically buy into Rokakis' countywide landbank program because by his own rules, it doesn't help East Cleveland. Additionally, he told me in 2006 during a meeting coordinated by Jimmy Dimora, Tim Hagan and Peter Lawson Jones, that he had $250,000 in demolition funds for East Cleveland that was to be funded through monies controlled by him and Bill Mason. Mason, however, had the final authority to say yes or no. When I followed-up with Rokakis, after I shared "his" promise with council and the residents, he said Mason decided to use the funds for another purpose and I ended up with egg on my face. From then on I viewed everything he told me with skepticism.

 

  

 

It's positions llike those described above that made some view me as abrasive. Anyone who fights for poor people or a predominantly Black city that has been disrespected, used and abused by everyone is always viewed as abrasive, and so is anyone who stands up to the Plain Dealer.