The Story

Like many Ohio cities, Marion struggles with blighted and abandoned houses that are a nuisance, an eyesore and a drain on public resources. Marion County officials only recently began using tax foreclosure to deal with blighted or abandoned houses, some of them unlived in for years and literally falling apart. But during the debate over blighted houses in town, the county was criticized for allowing unpaid property taxes to pile up unchecked, opening the door to abuse by people who had the money to pay their taxes, but didn't. Many of these people, critics said, were landlords and businessmen.

The Data

I wanted to find out who had racked up the most in overdue property taxes. I submitted a public records request to the Marion County Auditor's Office for delinquent property tax records after discussing how the office kept such records with a records custodian. A few days later, I obtained a Microsoft Excel file with the records, including the parcel number for every property that was delinquent as of May 1, 2018, the owner's name, their address, the amount due and the number of years delinquent.

There were a little over 2,100 records in the spreadsheet. While reviewing the data, I found that sometimes an owner's name was misspelled or the owner's middle initial was included in some entries but not in others. In some entries, the owner's spouse was listed, but not in others. I set about cleaning the data and imported it into Microsoft Access.

I identified the individuals with multiple spellings, using addresses when necessary to ensure they referred to the same person and cross-checking information using the Marion County Audtior's online property search tool. I used Access' update query to clean the data.

Once I finished cleaning the data, I created a query to identify the people who owed the most in back taxes. I grouped the owners by name and totaled the amount in back taxes they owed, ordering them from largest to smallest.

The person who owed the most was a local landlord who owed more than $70,000 in overdue property taxes and special assessments. Many of the other top owers also were landlords who had amassed tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes and been delinquent for years. These findings led to a high-interest story that was The Marion Star's most-read story in May.