A nuisance property - and how
Nuisance properties are not unusual, nor are tax scofflaws. Typically these matters are resolved in good time - perhaps a bit longer if the courts are involved.
But 26 years? Such is the case over a small plot of land on Lillian Street in Woburn.
In January 1947, James E. and Anna G. Horton left Burlington and bought a house at 5 Lillian St. for $6,500. They lived there for three decades at least, and not long after they died the house began to cave in, and the city had to demolish it. Now there is only a vacant lot and a sagging fence, still theoretically owned by the Hortons, who have not paid taxes since 1982 and now owe the city more than $63,000.
Woburn officials want to collect, and they also want the owners to tear the fence down. Short of either, they could take it down themselves and sell the property, erase the tax debt, and return the land to the active rolls.
The problem is, the Hortons - and their heirs - seem to have vanished.
That makes it difficult to serve notice, said City Clerk William C. Campbell, who has been part of the multifaceted effort to find the owners. "All the avenues that we went down led the wrong way," he said.
Usually notice of official action - a nuisance declaration, a lien, a threatened tax-taking - will be served without a hitch, and someone will come forward. Not this time, and not for lack of effort.
The missing owners complicate matters for the city. In September 1984, the city initiated proceedings at the Middlesex County Registry of Deeds after the Hortons failed to pay their $676 property tax bill for 1982. That meant the city effectively took title to the property, but the owners retained the right to recover it upon payment. After that, the case apparently took a back-burner to larger scofflaws, even though the Hortons did not pay their outstanding bill or any that followed.
The current collector and treasurer, Donald Jensen, restarted proceedings a few years ago, with the goal of collecting the money or acquiring the property through Land Court, which typically appoints a title examiner to identify any interested parties. That yielded nothing. Investigators working for the city have also failed to turn up evidence of the Hortons, despite visiting probate courts and registries of deeds across the state, searching vital records, scouring newspaper obituaries, and even employing a skip-tracing service.
"It's been one of the more unusual cases, because in other situations you'll generally have some thread leading back, tracing the property to the owners," said John D. Finnegan, a lawyer with Tarlow, Breed, Hart & Rodgers, the Boston firm that handles tax and title work for Woburn.
Last week, Finnegan was poised to take the next step on the city's behalf and ask a Land Court judge to allow the city to proceed and eventually seek a default judgment without finding the owners. To do so, it must demonstrate that it has exhausted all efforts to track down the Hortons or their heirs.
The process for knocking the fence down is a little less complicated. The City Council last month declared the property a nuisance and gave the owners three days to dismantle the twisting chain-link fence at the edge or else have the city remove it and put a lien on the property. But that clock hasn't started yet, because the owners could not be served.
Campbell, who hadn't faced that problem with other nuisance properties, consulted state law and learned city officials could instead ask a constable to notify the owners by posting a sign near the property and advertising it in a local paper.
Those ads are scheduled to run this week, he said. If the owners don't appeal, the city can take the fence down.
Sam Marciano, who lives across the street, offered simply to dismantle it with some friends but was told it would constitute trespassing.
Still, Marciano - whose father-in-law built the Horton home and others in the neighborhood - has been trimming the grass on the 4,400-square-foot lot for years, to keep it from becoming overgrown. He also installed a pitcher's mound a decade or so ago for his grandson to practice.
Marciano said he overlapped with the Hortons for a few years, remembering them as a quiet couple who didn't drive and didn't leave home much, though James Horton used to take a cab sometimes to drink at the Towanda Club.
He believes both were veterans, recalling that Anna Horton had Navy tattoos on her forearms.
"Two good old people," said Marciano, whose wife, Eleanor, sometimes looked in on the couple or shopped for them. "They never bothered anybody."
Marciano doesn't remember the exact year but believes both died in the 1980s, and that their lone daughter remained in the house for a year or so with her sons before leaving the crumbling home vacant.
"They had raccoons and everything living in it," Marciano said.
Darlene Mercer-Bruen, who represents the Ward 5 neighborhood on the City Council, said she learned about the property at a meeting she held in a nearby constituent's home. She said she has since pushed to recover the taxes - $21,144, plus $42,000 in interest, according to the city's treasurer and collector - and declare the fence a nuisance, so that the property can be cleaned and sold.
The vacant lot had been assessed at $81,800, but the value was downgraded recently to $16,400, Mercer-Bruen said, reflecting the fact that Woburn zoning requires 12,000 square feet to build a house. Even so, neighbors on either side could be interested in purchasing the corner lot for expansion of their own property.
But first, the city needs to finish acquiring the lot, which could join a portfolio of postage stamp-sized parcels that Woburn has come to own through less complicated means, Mercer-Bruen said. Each lot sale alone might yield only a few thousand dollars in revenue plus a few hundred dollars in annual property taxes, but together they could mean $200,000, she said.
"To me, that's a lot of dough," she said. "We could do a lot of things with $200,000."
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com. 