By Dave Baumeister
County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – While Minnehaha County Commissioners usually try to work with people on compromising liens, they were quick to turn down a request at their Tuesday, Feb. 1, meeting.
To finalize the purchase of a $300,000 house, a petitioner asked to have a lien of almost $30,000 removed from his name without payments.
Records of the lien go back to 2006, and they show that in that time only one payment of $75 had been made.
Commissioners have said they like to see an effort on the part of a lienee to pay something before they are willing to compromise.
According to the petitioner’s application, which was summarized by commission assistant Melinda Storley, the lien needed to be released by the closing date on the sale of the $300,000 property by Feb. 23.
In looking over the application, it was also noticed that the petitioner’s wife had a lien of her own in the amount of $39,000.
The commissioners weren’t sure why, if the two were married, why the liens weren’t against both of them, but since they weren’t the petitioner could go ahead with the sale if he could get his lien removed.
Commissioner Jeff Barth was the first to say he was against compromising the lien, as he has been very vocal in the past on seeing parties with liens making some payments.
“There are 185,000 people (county residents) not in this room who are owed this money,” Barth said.
Commission chairperson Cindy Heiberger said, “If they are looking at a $300,000 house, maybe they could find one for $250,000 and pay the county the rest.”
But Commissioner Dean Karsky took another approach and thought the only way to ever see any money from the petitioner was to forgive the lien and have him paying property taxes on his new house.
“Anymore, $300,000 is the average price of a house in Sioux Falls,” Karsky said. “It is hard to find something for less.”
He added that he felt the county would never see any money come in for the lien, “but if we make him a homeowner (the county will) maybe see something.”
However, the other commissioners did not agree, and the vote to deny the compromise of lien was 4–1, with Karsky dissenting.
Voting district updated
Minnehaha County Auditor Ben Kyte reported this week on changes made to the Minnehaha County voter roles to reflect census changes made by the state legislature in their re-districting last November.
As reported previously, in drawing their legislative map based on the federal 2020 Census, an increase in the Minnehaha County population gave the county one more legislative district.
Because of this, the new map from the legislature added that one district and re-drew the boundaries of others.
Kyte explained to commissioners how the auditor’s office had to update 35,000 voters to reflect those changes.
And he added that those changes were completed on Jan. 25.
As there will be no meeting next week, the next county commission meeting will be held at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 15, on the second floor of the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota Ave. in Sioux Falls.
Because of recent changes how the meeting agenda is set up, the time for public comment is now very close to the 9 a.m. start time.
Anyone can add input on items not already scheduled on the regular agenda.
