WJLA picked up the story that Renew Shaw first reported last week: DCRA now confirms that a handful of controversial, long-vacant properties owned by the trustees of Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw were improperly reclassified as no longer vacant, thus allowing the church to avoid paying additional nuisance property taxes. WJLA cites an official who estimates that the city lost out on $100,000 in revenue due to the error.

So how did this happen? You may recall that Shiloh’s vacant properties were condemned in 2007. The church was ordered to perform heavy maintenance work, including installing permanent roofs, fixing brickwork and masonry, installing gutters and down spouts, and cleaning the interiors. After some delay, that work was finally completed. But sometime since then, the church apparently applied for permits for more renovations, at which point the city removed the properties from the vacant list because they believed the church was finally planning to do something with them. As anyone who lives in the neighborhood (and I do) can tell you, there has been absolutely no change in the status of Shiloh’s vacants.

DCRA is now saying the properties have all been reclassified back to vacant since this story first broke. That’s hard to verify today via the city’s Real Property Assessment Database, which is only updated about once a week, and was last updated on March 21. The agency told WJLA it has not decided whether to go after the church for the back taxes — that will likely depend on whether DCRA determines it was their own fault for reclassifying the buildings prematurely.