Mayor Bloomberg is threatening to force foreclosure sales of more than 24,000 city properties to collect nearly $470 million the city is owed in unpaid property taxes and water bills.

The owners of 24,593 properties will receive warning letters from the city notifying them that a lien will be sold on their property if they do not pay off their debts, which range from $1,000 to millions of dollars, within 90 days. If the debts are not paid, a private collector hired by the city can begin foreclosure proceedings.

Mr. Bloomberg defended the city’s move yesterday and said his administration would take all appropriate steps to collect the money it is owed. He said everyone has an interest in the city enforcing laws.

“Everybody should pay. You pay, I pay, they should pay,” he said. “There’s no reason why you and I should subsidize somebody else.”
In 2006, the last time the city sent out similar warning letters, they went to 6,640 property owners. This year there are more than three times as many notices because, for the first time, the city is preparing to sell liens on residential properties where the owners have not paid their water bills.

The list of properties that owe the city money are in all five boroughs. They include a historic restaurant on Barrow Street in Manhattan’s West Village, One if by Land, Two if by Sea, and an Upper East Side property worth more than $10 million that is owned by Michael Melnitzky, a pro se litigator who was profiled last year in The New York Times. All properties on the city’s list to receive a warning letter were published in a 92-page advertisement placed by the city in yesterday’s Daily News.

Bloomberg administration officials say the city’s ability to sell water liens will give them a powerful tool when it comes to collecting on water bills that have gone unpaid for years. The city has traditionally not turned off water service to entice property owners to pay their water bills because it can require drilling into the ground and because a lack of water can lead to unsafe conditions for residents.

The City Council had mounted fierce opposition to Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal to sell water liens to force property owners to pay their bills, but in December reached an agreement with the administration that exempts single-family homes from water lien sales and protects low-income seniors and people with disabilities from the threat of foreclosure. The deal also averted an anticipated mid-year water rate increase.

The speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, said in a statement yesterday that the “water lien notification process allows us to crack down on those who take advantage of the system, while establishing important protections for consumers who follow the rules.”
One of the staunchest critics of the plan on the council, Council Member James Gennaro, said yesterday that a fair agreement had been reached with the Bloomberg administration that protects vulnerable populations.

“I was always for trying to reduce the burden on the majority of folks who pay their bills on time, and was never happy with the fact that there are some people who just don’t pay and there weren’t very many mechanisms to get them to pay,” he said.

The city hired a private collector that is a subsidiary of the Bear Stearns Companies Inc., Xspand, to collect the debt. A report published in the Daily Journal of New Jersey in October about Xspand said it takes in between 12 and 25 cents of every back dollar it recovers. A spokeswoman for the company, which was previously run by the former governor of New Jersey, James Florio, declined to comment yesterday.

A spokesman in the city’s Department of Finance said he could not immediately say how much the city was paying the company for its work.