MURFREESBORO – One of the items on Murfreesboro Town Council’s agenda here last Wednesday was the Howard Hunter Villas. It was recently discovered that the low-income housing development property located on the corners of Spring Avenue and Powell Road had not been paying town taxes.

Town Clerk Carolyn Brown said she discovered the issue when a resident of the Villas approached her to find out whether they could vote in town elections. Researching from there to figure out the answer, Brown said it “snowballed” to the discovery of the taxes not being collected.

“They had not been paying town taxes, but they had got all the town benefits,” Brown explained.

Brown said she had already talked to the county Tax Collector and just needed the direction from the Council on how to proceed.

“They need to write us a check,” said Councilman Bill Theodorakis bluntly, referring to the county, the entity responsible for collecting the taxes.

Town Council discussed the issue and agreed that it was indeed the county’s responsibility, not the property owners’, to take care of the money owed to the town. Hertford County collects taxes each year on Murfreesboro’s behalf.

Going forward, however, property owners in the Villas would have to pay town taxes like usual.

This is not the first problem the town has had with the Villas project. Construction began in 2003 but was plagued with development issues for years until it was completed around 2010 with an official ribbon cutting in 2011. Some of the lots in the Villas are still empty and available for additional housing construction.