Salt Lake County opposes property inventory bill

SALT LAKE CITY — A bill that would require counties to audit the properties they own each year and dispose of properties not being used each year got a thumbs down from the Salt Lake County Council on Wednesday.

SB163, sponsored by Sen. Mark B. Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain, would add the requirement that Salt Lake County would include approximately 1,550 properties, many of which are "small tax-deed strips that the county has no use for," said Lee Colvin, director of the county's Real Estate Division.

Selling them would be fine, but many are small strips that would only be of interest to the adjacent landowner. "We like to sell them to the adjoining owners to get rid of them and put them back on the tax rolls, and do so whenever we can," Colvin said. "We typically sell between a dozen and a couple of dozen tax-deed parcels per year."

But auditing that property portfolio every year would require about 20 people, which he doesn't have. And many of the parcels don't have a likely buyer that would enable the county to meet the bill's annual disposal requirement.

"Right now they're opposing something that will never have a hearing," Madsen said on Wednesday.

"The language was released prematurely," the senator said. "The County Council hit on one of the items, one of the wrinkles we needed to iron out."

The bill has been introduced in the Senate but has not been assigned to a committee. "I can virtually guarantee it won't move any more from where it is," Madsen said.

— Steve Fidel Twitter: SteveFidel