Wayside Church updates Update 10/10/2025: The Sixth Circuit has finally released its decision. It can be found here. The court has affirmed the decision of the lower court (the Western District of Michigan) approving the settlement on behalf of the plaintiff class with the numerous counties. It is possible that the objecting members will try to appeal this decision further, either to an en banc panel of the 6th Circuit or to the United States Supreme Court. I do not consider either of these likely, but a more reliable opinion would have to come from the attorneys handling the appeals on behalf of the class. Plaintiffs' class co-counsel advises that the Settlement Agreement provides that the "effective date" of the settlement following a concluded appeal is the date by which a petition for writ of certiorari must be filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. That is January 4, 2026. If no en banc rehearing is requested, and if no petition is filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, that appears to be the earliest date that the train can start moving forward again. There was a Declaration (document 517) filed by Scott Fenwick of Kroll Settlement Services on Feburary 12. This reported on the total number of claims filed, including lienholder claims. Included in the Declaration was the following: 16. As of February 12, 2024, Kroll has received no fewer than 2,649 Claims where the Claimant indicated their interest in an Eligible Property to be that of an heir or Kroll has identified the Claim as belonging to an heir. These 2,649 Claims are connected to 1,702 Eligible Properties with maximum potential total Surplus Proceeds of $21,842,630.42. After removing Claims received on any Eligible Property that had also received a request for exclusion, the maximum potential Surplus Proceeds for heir Claims would be $20,734,075.51. 17. As agreed by Counsel, any Claimant whose Claim is deemed deficient will be notified via first-class mail of their deficiency and given forty-five (45) days to cure such deficiency. Should the Claimant not cure the deficiency, that Claim will be rejected under the terms of the Settlement. As of April 26, for the 16 estate claims we are handling, there has not been any communication from Kroll.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE BACKGROUND Under the General Property Tax Act (GPTA), after a county forecloses on a parcel of land for unpaid property taxes in default for more than three years, the parcel becomes the county’s property on entry of a judgment of foreclosure, and then can be sold at auction. The proceeds are then used to pay the back property taxes and any accumulated interest and penalties. The GPTA went further and permitted the county to retain all of the proceeds from auction sales, and did not require that the excess funds be paid over to the defaulting landowner. In the case of Rafaeli v. Oakland County, decided in 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the sections of the GPTA that allowed counties to retain the excess funds were unconstitutional, as a taking of private property without compensation. The Wayside Church lawsuit was filed in Federal court in Grand Rapids, as a class action, against several counties in Western Michigan and the U.P., seeking repayment of the excess proceeds received by the counties and not returned to landowners. A description of the Rafaeli case can be found at this link. The Kroll Settlement Site provides information on the status of the class action lawsuit. It does not, however, do a very good job of doing so. As an example, the main introduction to the page says "On February 13, 2024, the Court conducted a day-long hearing regarding the pending Motion for Final Approval. The Court has not yet ruled on that motion." As noted to the left, however, the Court did rule on that motion in late July 2024, and that ruling is now pending on appeal. The Court's opinion making that ruling has been linked at the bottom of the column, but the main introduction has not changed.