Hay River seeks altered rules for indebted properties to be auctioned
Published 5:57 am Friday, August 21, 2026
As it auctions off 10 private properties due to tax arrears, the Town of Hay River is asking the GNWT for changes in dealing with indebted properties.
Blair Porter, Hay River’s director of corporate services, said the current law that allows communities to auction off properties that are in tax arrears has too many restrictions, and told territorial government officials as much during a review in late 2025.
The law, the NWT Property Assessment and Taxation Act (PATA), gives taxation communities like Hay River the ability to auction off properties that have unpaid tax arrears for more than two years to recoup the owed taxes.
PATA and its attached regulations require that those properties be auctioned off with bids starting at half the appraised value and cannot be sold for lower.
It also requires the tax authorities to offer payment plans for owners, and give them the ability to get their property back if they pay the arrears, even up to 30 days after properties have been auctioned off.
Hay River wants both of these requirements eliminated, according to Porter, along with other minor changes to PATA, to make the law more effective at auctioning off properties and tax arrears recouped.
The town’s municipal government hopes to get the legislation changed so that once a property is put up for auction, the owner will no longer have an option to get it back, before or after it’s sold, Porter said.
“Once [properties] get onto the auction list, every other recourse has been examined and they have just not paid,” he said. “If it takes them that long to not even respond to us, to not even work with us in any way shape or form, it shouldn’t be as easy as well, we just pay the arrears and then that property remains ours and then we go through the same process over and over and over again.”
He said the existing legislation creates a “vicious cycle” where properties don’t get auctioned yet taxes also aren’t properly paid, all while driving up administrative costs and workloads.
Even when properties do go to auction, the legislated minimum price often leads to no successful bids and the property sometimes ends up back in the indebted owner’s hands, Porter noted.
“If we were able to take it over and sell it for less than that, that might be an incentive for these property owners to actually pay the taxes, as opposed to letting their property be sold,” he said. “Honestly, we’d rather not sell anybody’s property. We just want the taxes, but it gets to the point where some of them… they know nobody’s going to actually have an interest in it because the price is too high and there’s no recourse.”
If a property is auctioned for more than its total arrears plus an administrative fee to the town, the original owner gets the money leftover.
Combined, the property owners owe the town more than $540,000.
PATA was first enacted in 1988, and, up until 2025-26, was only fully reviewed one time — in 2022 — meaning some aspects have not kept up with technology, like tax authorities not being allowed to email notices to people in arrears, which Porter also flagged as an issue.
MACA launched another review of PATA in 2025, with an engagement period from Dec. 18, 2025 to Jan. 16, 2026.
Porter said multiple taxation communities are generally “on the same page” about issues with PATA, and that MACA representatives were receptive, but added that “we didn’t talk to the decision-makers, we just talked to the staff.”
MACA staff advised them that some changes to the legislation would require public consultation or to go through the legislative assembly, according to Porter, adding that he hasn’t heard any updates on the process since.
The GNWT’s page for the legislation’s review still has its status as “open” to review despite stating the window closed in January.