06/22/2026
In an effort to help with understanding the tax foreclosure process, please see the outline below.
If you have received a tax lien notice, and not taken steps to rectify it, the lien will be foreclosed upon in accordance with Maine statute. Many properties have been in foreclosure for some time and we have been more than lenient with everyone and allowed the process to stretch out and taxes not to be collected as they should.
At the time of a lien foreclosure;
1. Foreclosure notice from the tax collector is sent, certified mail.
When the tax collector mails that foreclosure letter, a 30 day amnesty starts. Any tax payer can come in and make a payment plan during this time or pay the full amount plus interest, costs, and admin fees. Provided the plan is appropriate and approved by the selectmen, it will stop the foreclosure from effecting their right's to the property. If you stop making payments on that plan or miss 2 payments in a row without making alternate arrangements with the tax collector, you automatically end up at step 2 without further discussion.
2. At the end of the 30 days amnesty, Selectmen send a letter informing the tax payer that their time to rectify their situation has expired and their property will be sold. The property is owned by the town on the day the selectmen send this letter. There are a few who have chosen to ignore this letter and the previous foreclosure notice all together.
3. The date the letter is mailed is the date the deed to the property is held by the town. You are no longer the owner of the property at this point.
4. For the next 90 days the town sits on the property. If the tax payer wants the property back during this time, they can buy it from the town before it goes on the market. There are no payment plans during this 90 days, the cost of return of the property is the taxes owed, interest, lien fees, and whatever admin fee is associated with the procedure.
5. If they do not purchase it back in the 90 days, the town can and will attempt to sell the property using a Realtor for the next year (12 months). If sales through a realtor are unsuccessful after 12 months, the town may sell, or otherwise dispose of, the property by whatever method the selectmen so choose.
6. After all costs, fees, interest, and tax from the sale have been deducted, any profit on the sale goes back to the previous owner. This part of the statute specifies that it doesn’t matter when that
sale occurs, all profit goes to the previous owner. If no owner is located to receive the money, the town returns the profits to the state for them to list it as unclaimed property.
If you have received a foreclosure notice and certified letters, and have ignored or not bothered to attend to your taxes, you are likely on the clock already or the clock may have already expired. Those letters have been sent many different times in the last several years with no change to many overdue accounts.
You can make a payment arrangement at any time between the day you receive your tax bill and the end of the 30 day foreclosure amnesty. The tax collector and selectmen are available in Pembroke more times during any given week than in any other town in this county, a plan can be done with any of us.
You can hate on the selectmen or town government for any of this if you want but the county tax isn't going down, the school budget never goes down very far for very long, and we hold the line on spending so as to not have to raise the municipal share of appropriation any more than necessary in a world where no cost stays the same from 1 quarter to the next, let alone 1 fiscal year to the next. Properties sitting on the tax roles that have not been collected on for 3, 5, 9, or 11 years puts the burden to pay all of the above taxes on everyone else. Likely a majority of you reading this fall within that "everyone else" category.
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