Surprise, Your Home is for Sale! By Angela Rieck

I returned from Florida last week and was reviewing my recent mail. I received my sewer bill and an envelope that looked like a duplicate of the sewer bill, I started to toss it, but I opened it anyway.

It was a whopper. It said that my house was being put up for auction for an unpaid bill of approximately $500. I had several days to go to the Talbot County office and pay the bill to prevent it from appearing the paper, I complied, but they advertised it anyway. 

My immediate question was, what bill? Like most people, I get my bills and then I pay them right away. But I had never received this bill.

At first, I thought that this was a scam, who would put up a house for auction for $500 in arrears? But I called and went to the Talbot Office and sure enough, my home had been listed for sale at auction to recoup a $500 payment.

Researching this with the town of St Michaels, it turned out I was supposed to be getting a bill online, but I never received it. Apparently, I was 5 payments in arrears for water. I paid my sewer bill on time (thinking like my other municipality that sewer and water were linked) and had no idea that I was not paying bills that I never received. We verified over the phone that I had never gotten a bill (by searching through scam folders and all other folders with keywords that yielded no bill). In addition, they confirmed that I was not getting a bill by mail.

My first question for the town: Why didn’t someone call me or send a letter letting me know about these bills? Why didn’t they warn me that they would send this to Talbot County to have my house put up for auction? They could also have looked up my payments and seen that I was paying my sewer and taxes on time, so I was likely not receiving this water bill. They could have shut my water off. Instead, they chose to send it to Talbot County to place the home up for auction. 

In fact, the first letter I received about this process was the notice that my home was being advertised for sale at the upcoming auction. I never received any notice from St Michaels that they would be sending my bill to Talbot County to have my house put up for auction. Had I delayed my return from Florida, my home would be auctioned off without my knowing about it.

How can this happen in a town with approximately 1,000 residents? I had a similar experience in a large town, where we had not paid a couple of sewer/water bills while my husband was in hospice. I got a notice by mail that the bill had been unpaid, I called and explained and paid the bill immediately.

Instead of any notifications, St. Michaels, choose the method of auctioning off my home.

I spoke with the new Town Manager, Don Richardson, about this unlikely chain of events; he indicated that he had been on the job for 6 weeks and that he would be looking into it.

For now, all citizens of St Michaels should know (a) if you are behind in your bills (in my case it was 5 payments), your home will be auctioned off, no matter the amount owed, (b) St Michaels will not verify that the bills are being received, (c) you will receive no notification from the St Michaels that they are putting your house up for auction through Talbot County, (d) you will only receive notification from Talbot County when the home is being advertised for sale, but it won’t matter if you pay the bill in cash and on time, they will still advertise your home for auction, and (e) water and sewer bills are separate.

I guess small towns are not so small after all.

Angela Rieck, a Caroline County native, received her PhD in Mathematical Psychology from the University of Maryland and worked as a scientist at Bell Labs, and other high-tech companies in New Jersey before retiring as a corporate executive. Angela and her dogs divide their time between St Michaels and Key West Florida. Her daughter lives and works in New York City.