As a result of the Mahoning Valley Real Estate Investors (MVREIA) and the County Landbank meeting last Monday, Youngstown's old land families are ready to resolve delinquent property taxes en masse. A significant percentage of delinquent parcels in the City of Youngstown have been inherited and the heirs received no income from the property to service the tax assessments. With the understanding that the new legislation HB 313 allows the new landbank to reassess property taxes, and with the current bonus offer for mineral rights of land, many property owners through the MVREIA are willing to come forward and resolve all delinquent taxes. Issues which are needed to be resolved is the outdated assessments of vacant parcels in Youngstown, such as taxes assessed for houses on lots that were demolished decades ago. Also the higher assessment on raw land based on residential usage when parcels clearly have no infrastructure whatsoever and should be more in line with acreage assessments.
This clearly is a very positive accomplishment of cohesion among the public and private sector which will result in more revenue to the County. An example of the amount of parcels to be resolved are over 1000 parcels by one family and hundreds of parcels owned by dozens of heirs and investors.
I predicted this three years ago, mineral rights must be valued in all Landbank activities, to ignore them would be to defraud estates of a value.