DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd has said that her department’s ability to sell stand-alone liens against the property of delinquent customers has been its “single most effective enforcement tool” (quoted in a New York Times article dated October 7, 2007 by Anthony DePalma). About a year and a half ago the DEP lost its ability to sell stand-alone liens and it was replaced by the right to sell tax liens.

So what’s the difference between these two types of liens, tax and stand-alone?

In the interest of being as explanatory as possible, let’s first define the word lien as it appears by itself. Wikipedia defines a lien as “a form of security interest granted over an item of property to secure the payment of a debt or performance of some other obligation.”

In our case this means that if the DEP secures a lien on a property of which the water bill has gone unpaid, the DEP has the right to sell that property and use that collected money as payment for the water bill.

In essence, the scenario described above is a stand-alone water lien, where the DEP has the ability to sell a lien against a property for the sole purpose of collecting on a water bill.

A tax lien is when an entity has the right to sell a property for the purpose of collecting unpaid taxes.

How does this relate to the DEP, as the DEP bills for water usage and not taxes?

Currently, with its ability to sell tax liens and not stand-alone liens, the DEP can only sell a lien against a property if that property is also delinquent on taxes. The DEP claims that this makes their current lien selling ability an ineffective tool for collecting unpaid bills, as only about 15% of their unpaid bills come from properties that are also delinquent taxpayers. This leaves the DEP in a situation where they have no lien sale rights on about 85% of their unpaid bills.