Supervisors to conduct tax deed auction of properties

Yuma County’s Board of Supervisors will hold a special meeting Monday to conduct a tax deed auction of about 100 properties on which no taxes have been paid for seven years, which have reverted to state ownership and will be sold off to the highest bidder.

These auctions are often handled during a regular board meeting, County Treasurer Angela Pancrazi Moreno said. “Usually there’s not too many, but this year we have so many they felt it would take a lot longer, so they just did it as one, felt like they needed to make it one day just for the tax deed auction,” she said.

The auction begins at 9 a.m., but bidders need to arrive between 8 and 9 a.m. to pick up their bid cards, said Dunia Federico, an administrative assistant for the county who is running the auction.

The opening bid on each property will be $100, and no written bids were received before the deadline of Feb. 27, she said.

Moreno said these parcels have had not had their taxes paid off by either the original owner or an inves- tor who took on the liens, which themselves are auctioned off after two years of nonpayment by the owner. When it gets to that point, the county turns the deeds over to the state, and then auctions them off on behalf of the state so the land will get back on the tax rolls.

“There’s a big process of making sure, by the time you deed it over to the state, we as the treasurer’s office have gone through the long process of notifying everybody involved, through certified means and publications, that this is going to happen,” Moreno said.

Some of the properties available this year are small strips of land which were intended to be public right-of-ways but never got through that process, while others are never-developed lots in subdivisions in the east county and elsewhere.

The auction’s public notice and list of available properties can be found at www.yumacountyaz.gov through the board meeting notice under the “meetings and events” tab, or via the public notices section of www.yumasun.com, found under the “news” menu.