"OCEAN-FRONT PROPERTY IN BROWNSVILLE, TX..."

"I got some ocean front property in Arizona.
If you'll buy that, I'll throw the golden gate in free..."

Ocean-Front Property, by George Strait

 

By Juan Montoya

For months now, Cameron County Tax Assessor-Collector Tony Yzaguirre has been trying to sell 9.041 acres of prime real-estate just off Dana Road north of Bob Torres Blvd. (FM 802).

The area is developing rapidly. New schools are nearby, and middle-class neighborhoods are popping out across from Dana Road. North on Dana across a drainage ditch and a Resaca is Alton Gloor Road, another realtor's delight.

The 9.041 acres are right in the middle of a upper middle-class neighborhood called the Northeast Estates Subdivision Phase II. Homes surrounding the property range between the middle $80,000s to more than $100,000.  There are fields on the north and south on Dana and it abuts an upper-middle class Hudson subdivision to the west. From the air it looks like a dark, stretched out, enlarged "T" (See graphic, click to enlarge)

His asking price?

"The land was selling for delinquent taxes owed on it at just a little over $7,000," he said. "We had it for sale once but no one bought it and we placed it on resale again but since we have pulled it."
That's about $777 per acre in a rapidly-developing area, a bargain any way one looks at it.

The reason the tax assessor-collector's office decided not to seek a buyer is because the property is a retention pond that is used to alleviate flooding in the subdivision.

On August 12, 2003, grantors Reynaldo G. Garza and Virginia Garcia filed a warranty deed and Vendor's Lien with Texas State Bank as the lien holder for $1,434,096. The subdivision is listed as encompassing 40.506 acres of land of which the 9.041 are listed as a "reserve."

Their mailing address of Northeast Estates LTD. is listed as a P.O. Box in Grand Prairie, Dallas County, Texas.

Over time, the developers allowed delinquent taxes to accumulate and then disregarded the notices from the county and the delinquent tax lawyers and let it go.

"If some sharp real-estate buyer had bought the property the first time it was for sale and then filled it and started to build on it, there's nothing anyone could have done," Yzaguirre said. "Building on it would have resulted in flooding of the entire neighborhood and the residents would probably have gone to the county or the city for help."

If the county or the city had protested against construction on the land, the buyer could have named his price after having paid only $7,000 for it.

Unwilling to have the county face that prospect, Yzaguirre said he had pulled the land from the delinquent-tax property sales in front of the courthouse.

"I am consulting with legal to see what we can do," he said. "We don't know if there is anything that the county can do, but we are named as the trustees of foreclosed properties which are seized for delinquent taxes."

Cases like this, where the mortgages of the adjoining properties have probably been sold once, if not twice, by the lienholder are not an uncommon occurrence in Cameron County. In the past sharp developers have done the same thing, letting delinquent taxes accumulate and the washing their hands of the matter after the property is seized by the taxing entities.

In this case, the Brownsville Independent School District, South Texas ISD, the City of Brownsville, the Brownsville Navigation District, the county, Drainage District #1, and Texas Southmost College are all owed taxes on the property. Unless it's sold, it's unlikely that any of them will ever see a penny of it.

"This has happened before and I remember a developer laughing about it and saying some stupid woman had bought the land without knowing it was a retention pond and then not being able to do anything with it.," said a county supervisor. "He was done with it and didn't care what happened to the buyer."
Yzaguirre said that the county and the city would probably be getting together to discuss the issue, but that unless there is some legislation to address this specific subject, developers will probably continue to do this and walk away from the problem they created.