Michigan's tax foreclosure law is stupid, and it's only fair if it's evenly applied.

That's not happening in Wayne County.

Every spring, county governments across Michigan foreclose on properties that owe three years of back taxes. Every fall, tax-foreclosed properties are sold at auction. That's required by state law.

But in Wayne County, some tax delinquent properties escape foreclosure. And some foreclosed properties aren't auctioned, returned to their former owners long after the deadline for redemption has passed.

Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree has withdrawn some properties from the auction weeks before it was set to begin. In at least one instance, Sabree rejected a last-minute attempt to settle vulnerable Detroiters' back taxes.

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Jerry Paffendorf, CEO of Detroit data firm Loveland Technologies, asked Sabree's office for the policy or guidelines that would explain how these decisions are made, information anyone is entitled to under the state's public records law.

But the treasurer's office denied Paffendorf's request, explaining that there is no policy to disclose.

On Thursday, Wayne County Executive Warren Evans' office confirmed that. In a statement upholding Sabree's denial of Paffendorf's request, a county official noted that the treasurer has the right to access the county register of deeds database directly. In other words, it seems, Sabree and his staff can directly modify Wayne County land ownership records at will.

In the absence of rules, Sabree operates with great latitude, protecting some properties from tax foreclosure while selling others to the highest bidder.

Sabree says he wants to keep Detroiters in their homes. But government at one man's discretion isn't democracy.

Because Sabree won't disclose how he makes such decisions, it's impossible to know whether he's truly prioritizing Detroit's most vulnerable homeowners — or whether his decisions serve some other purpose.

The numbers, and some background

Around 150,000 Wayne County properties have been foreclosed since 2005, most of them in Detroit.

This year, nearly 35,000 tax-delinquent Wayne County properties were subject to foreclosure. After foreclosure notices go out, some property owners enter payment plans or settle their debts. Sabree asked a judge to foreclose on just 9,000 of those tax-delinquent parcels. But less than half of those foreclosed properties — 3,960 — are scheduled for auction this fall, Sabree's office said last month; 1,083 of those are occupied structures, housing roughly 3,000 Detroiters.

How did Sabree's office decide who would get to stay in their homes and who would have to leave?

Effectively, he's asking Detroiters to trust his judgment.

Other problems with the auction

For years, the city levied property tax based on inflated assessments. The city hasn't adequately communicated to impoverished homeowners that they are legally exempt from paying property tax, settling a lawsuit brought by the ACLU by agreeing to step up its efforts.

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Most auctioned properties are purchased by bulk buyers, who may let properties languish, unimproved, or immediately re-enter tax foreclosure. Auctioned properties are more likely to become blighted.

Sabree himself has said that the auction, which displaces Detroiters every year, is not good practice. If it weren't required by state law, he says, he would not hold it.

But Sabree was the sole dissenting vote last week on a new Wayne County Land Bank program that would keep impoverished county residents in their homes. The new program, approved by a majority of the land bank's board of directors, would use the land bank's quiet title powers to wipe out back taxes for property owners who qualified for the poverty exemption in the current tax year.

Sabree assured land bank employees worried about the timeline of the new tax forgiveness program that the homeowners those staffers were worried about wouldn't be foreclosed. The treasurer's office, he said, can make sure that doesn't happen.

But Paffendorf calls that kind of manipulation an "arbitrary pressure release valve."The number of homes foreclosed and auctioned has dropped dramatically in recent years, but the number of tax-delinquent homes has only declined by 13%.

Since 2016, 34,000 Wayne County residents have entered tax payment plans. By reducing the number of properties, and particularly occupied homes, headed for auction, the treasurer's office can hide the persistence of property tax delinquency in a city where 40% of residents live in poverty.

For the record

I asked Sabree's office to comment on the absence of a policy for deciding whose property gets auctioned. Spokesman Mario Morrow responded via email: "The denial speaks for itself."

Warren Evans' spokesman, Jim Martinez, wrote this in an email: "There should be some core guidelines in writing that give the treasurer discretion he needs to do his job but help the public understand the process. We’ve expressed our concerns about the foreclosure process for a while. There are some steps we favor that can help prevent people from experiencing foreclosure in the first place, like applying the Poverty Tax Exemption retroactively.”

The buck stops nowhere

Sabree has said that he is working hard to keep Detroiters in their homes, that even one displaced Detroiter is unacceptable. He has worked with the United Community Housing Coalition and other ground-level service providers to that end.

But Paffendorf says property records suggest that vulnerable residents aren't the only property owners getting a break. Records suggest that some of the roughly 6,000 properties withheld from the auction are occupied homes, the list includes thousands of non-resident owners and hundreds of LLCs.

Who deserves a break, and who loses their home? Sabree needs to explain in much more detail how such decisions are made.

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.