Washington is going to get more aggressive when it comes to collecting money owed the city, including some properties on which it has liens.

During the City Council’s meeting Monday, City Manager Brian Alligood told the mayor and council members what the city plans to do about the those delinquent accounts and “lien properties.” When property owners owe the city money for delinquent taxes or services provided the city, sometimes liens are placed against the property. Before such properties can be sold, the liens must be satisfied.

“We have liens on some property within the city that are for demolition, but the majority of our liens that we have on property in the city are for things like nuisance abatement — grass cutting, lawn mowing — those kind of things,” Alligood said. “They’re not significant amounts of money, but when they’re all said and done — we include some of the pavement assessments in there — there’s an outstanding balance of about $88,000. Of that, you take out a couple of those — ($22,000), $33,000 or so for pavement assessments that are being paid off as they were initially agreed to be paid off. We’ve got one that’s delinquent that we’re going to have to go after, but the remaining pieces are smaller pieces.”

Alligood indicated the city might want to carefully consider instituting foreclosures on some of the properties.

“Some of the properties that we’ve had, if we go through the foreclosure process, it adds about $5,000 to the process to do all the legal work to foreclose on a piece of property,” he said. “Some properties, say you have a demolition lien of $4,000 or $5,000, and then you add to that another $5,000 in legal fees to foreclose on that piece of property, you’re $10,000 or so into the property. Folks may only offer you $2,000 or $3,000 for it (at a foreclosure sale). You’ve seen that with property you’ve had before.”

Alligood said the city uses the debt set-off procedure to recover smaller amounts of money owed to the city. Under that program, if a property owner is due a tax refund from the state, all or part of that refund is used to settle the lien.

“There are other remedies for us to do, besides foreclosure. We can do (wage) garnishment and attachment. Traditionally, the city has not done that. My background comes from a county (government) background where we did a lot of that, and you’re able to do that with nuisance fees,” Alligood said. “Our goal is to start that process as well, whether we attach your bank account or whether we garnish your wages. There’s a statutory provision to do that, and it recovers the funds that are due the city.”

Councilman Bobby Roberson indicated he supports the city’s mover.

“I think it’s a good alternative — just give them notice,” he said.

Councilman Doug Mercer said he would like the city to become more aggressive in collecting ambulance-service fees owed to the city.

“In the last two years, we have written off a half a million dollars a year in medical items. That’s a million dollars in just the last couple of years. That’s the big one. If we need to do something that will allow us to at least file the initial paperwork in the time frame, we ought to be working on a process to do that.”

Alligood said there are several ways the city can collect those overdue fees, including garnishment and attachment.