Oklahoma City Abandoned Buildings: The Council List, the Quarterly Assessment, and the Lien That Outranks the Mortgage

Oklahoma City has no vacant property registry. There is no form to file, no annual fee, no renewal date. That sounds like relief until you read what replaced it. Under Chapter 35, Article IX of the Municipal Code, the City Council holds a hearing, declares a building abandoned, and orders the City Clerk to place it on an abandoned building list. From that moment the city assesses its actual costs of regulating the property every quarter, files a notice of lien before any abatement work starts, and ends up with a lien the ordinance makes coequal with ad valorem taxes and superior to every other title and lien on the property. Nobody sends you a registration reminder. The first Article IX document you get is a hearing notice, and it goes to the address on the tax roll — but by then the building has already been declared unsecured or dilapidated in a proceeding of its own.

What "Abandoned Building" Actually Means

Sec. 35-261 sets a two-part test, and both parts have to hold. The building must be not currently occupied, and it must have been declared an unsecured building or a dilapidated building under 11 O.S. Sec. 22-112 or Sec. 22-112.1 — and remain in that condition. "Owner" means the owner of record according to the current year's tax rolls, which is the first operational detail worth noting: the city's notice follows the tax roll, not the deed, not the servicer's correspondence address.

Sec. 35-262 declares abandoned buildings a nuisance and detrimental to the public health, safety or welfare of the city's inhabitants and visitors, and excludes land zoned and used for agricultural purposes. Everything else in the city is in scope, but the condition test does real work here. A vacant Oklahoma City building that is properly secured and in repair is not an abandoned building, no matter how long it has been empty. That is the opposite of a registration city, where vacancy alone triggers the obligation.

Because the trigger is borrowed from state law, the state definitions are the ones that bind. 11 O.S. Sec. 22-112.1(C)(11)(b) defines an unsecured building as a structure not occupied by its legal or equitable owner or that owner's lessee, with one or more unsecured openings — broken or unlocked windows and doors, holes in exterior walls or the roof, broken or unlocked basement or cellar hatchways, or other similar unsecured openings which would facilitate an unauthorized entry. The catch-all at the end does the heavy lifting: the list is illustrative, not exhaustive. One failed board-up or one unlocked back door is enough to meet it.

11 O.S. Sec. 22-112(C)(1) defines a dilapidated building through five clauses, and two of them are cumulative rather than conditional:

• A structure which, through neglect or injury, lacks necessary repairs or otherwise is in a state of decay or partial ruin to such an extent that the structure is a hazard to the health, safety or welfare of the general public
• A structure which is unfit for human occupancy due to the lack of necessary repairs and is considered uninhabitable or is a hazard to the health, safety, and welfare of the general public
• A structure determined by the governing body or its administrative officer to be an unsecured building more than three times within any twelve-month period
• A structure which has been boarded and secured, as defined in 11 O.S. Sec. 22-112.1, for more than six consecutive months
• A structure declared by the governing body to be a public nuisance

Read the third and fourth clauses together and the operational consequence is clear. A property that keeps getting broken into meets the dilapidated-building definition on the fourth unsecured finding in a year, regardless of its physical condition, and a board-up left standing for more than six consecutive months brings the building inside the same definition on time alone. Meeting the definition is not the end of it — Sec. 22-112(A) still requires a hearing and a finding that the condition is detrimental, and Article IX needs an actual declaration — but it is what opens the door. Boarding and securing is what the statute measures: "the closing, boarding or locking of any or all exterior openings so as to prevent entry into the structure" (Sec. 22-112.1(C)(11)(a)). The six-month clock is the reason to replace boards with proper doors and locking hardware rather than leave them up through a slow disposition.

How a Building Gets on the List

Sec. 35-263 governs notice. The city must give at least ten days' notice before the City Council hearing. Notice is mailed to the owner per the tax rolls and to any mortgage holder of record in the county clerk's records, and a receipt of mailing must be obtained. If neither the owner nor a mortgage holder can be located, the city posts notice on the property and publishes it once in a newspaper under 11 O.S. Sec. 1-102, at least ten days before the hearing.

Article IX adds no cure period of its own. The contestable step came earlier: a building only qualifies once it has already been declared unsecured or dilapidated under 11 O.S. Sec. 22-112 or Sec. 22-112.1, and each of those carries its own track — at least ten days' notice mailed to the owner and any mortgage holder, a copy of the notice posted on the property, and a hearing. A servicer whose mailing address of record on the county tax roll is stale — a common state of affairs after a loan transfer — may learn about either hearing from the newspaper, or not at all.

At the hearing, Sec. 35-264 lets the Council order abatement of the nuisance and order the City Clerk to place the building on the abandoned building list. The abatement the Council may order includes a quarterly assessment of the actual costs of municipal regulatory action concerning the property, the costs of any police or fire protection action concerning it, and an assessment for any other actual expenses incurred in relation to the building, including but not limited to notices, mailings and publications. Before abatement begins, the City Clerk files a notice of lien with the county clerk, and from the date of that filing the costs become the personal obligation of the owner.

The Quarterly Assessment Is the Expensive Part

Most municipal vacant-property costs are a known annual number. Oklahoma City's is mostly actual cost — a running bill for whatever regulating the property costs the city, assessed every three months for as long as the building stays on the list. Police and fire responses are explicitly chargeable under Sec. 35-264(2)(b), and unlike the rest of the assessment they carry codified rates: $65.00 per responding officer per hour and $73.00 per responding firefighter per hour (Sec. 60-35-20). So are the notices, mailings and publications the city generates about the property — a category the ordinance states is not limited to those items, and one that plausibly reaches the cost of the listing process itself.

Sec. 35-265 sets the collection mechanism. Quarterly statements are mailed to the owner and to any mortgage holder. If a statement is unpaid six months from the date it was mailed, a lien in the actual amount of the abatement is filed, and it takes its priority from the date the original notice of lien went on record. The ordinance's words on that lien are worth reading closely: it "shall be coequal with the lien of ad valorem taxes and all other taxes and special assessments and shall be prior and superior to all other titles and liens against the property." A mineral interest severed from the surface interest and not owned by the surface owner is exempt from it.

That priority language is why this ordinance matters to a lender rather than only to an owner. A lien coequal with ad valorem taxes sits ahead of the mortgage. It is not a code fine competing for position — it is a tax-grade encumbrance accruing quarterly on an asset the servicer may be carrying toward a sale, and the mortgage holder receives the quarterly statements as a matter of course under Sec. 35-265, even though Sec. 35-264(3) makes the costs the owner's personal obligation.

What the City Charges When It Does the Work

The quarterly assessment covers regulatory cost. Physical work is priced separately in Chapter 60, and the figures there are administrative fees layered on top of the actual contract — the tier is set by the estimated cost of the contract, not charged in place of it.

The board-up tiers run from $350 where the estimated contract cost is $1,000 or less, through $450, $550, $650, $750 and $1,000, to $1,350 where the estimated contract cost is above $10,000. The demolition tiers run from $600 where the estimated contract cost is $5,000 or less, through $750, $1,000, $1,250, $1,600 and $1,950, to $2,350 where the estimated contract cost is above $50,000. All four of these figures — board-up, demolition, police and fire response, and the release fee — were last set by Ordinance 27978 on November 18, 2025, so they are current rather than legacy — confirm with the city before budgeting, because the schedule is revised by ordinance.

There is a separate state-law collection route for board-up costs that does not depend on Article IX at all. Under 11 O.S. Sec. 22-112.1, after notice and a hearing the municipality may board and secure an unsecured building, and if the cost statement is unpaid thirty days after mailing the clerk certifies the amount to the county treasurer, who collects it with the taxes plus a $5.00 per-parcel fee. The same statute allows a second board-up within six months to be carried out summarily as a public nuisance where the original notice warned that it might be, with notice and a ten-day right to request an appeal following afterwards.

Getting Off the List

Sec. 35-266 gives both the owner and any mortgage holder standing to petition. The petition goes to the Development Services Director in writing, at any time after the Council's determination, and is filed with the City Clerk. A hearing follows within thirty days. Two limits matter. Removal is prospective only — the property and the owner remain liable for costs incurred before it. And once the amount owed is paid in full, a release of lien is filed within ten days, which means the lien survives removal from the list until the money is paid.

Sec. 35-267, added in 2017, provides the appeal: the property owner may appeal an order of the Development Services Director to the City Council by written notice filed within ten days after the order is delivered or mailed. The asymmetry is deliberate — Sec. 35-266 gives a mortgage holder standing to petition, but Sec. 35-267 gives the right of appeal to the owner alone. Ten days is the recurring number in this ordinance — ten days' notice before the hearing, ten days to appeal, ten days to get the release filed — and none of those windows are long enough to survive internal routing at a servicer that is not watching for them.

What This Means for an Oklahoma City Asset

The practical difference between Oklahoma City and a registration city is where the deadline sits. In Cleveland or Columbus the obligation starts on a date you can calendar and the risk is a fee you forgot to pay. In Oklahoma City there is nothing to calendar, and the risk is a condition finding at the state-law stage, which is where the exposure is actually decided. The whole exposure turns on whether the building is secure and in repair — because that is the statutory trigger, and because every cost in Article IX follows from crossing it.

• Update the tax-roll mailing address after any transfer. It is the address the Article IX hearing notice goes to, and the ordinance requires no cure notice before it.
• Treat each unsecured finding as a countable event. More than three in twelve months meets the dilapidated-building definition under 11 O.S. Sec. 22-112(C)(1)(c) on condition findings alone.
• Date every board-up and replace it inside six months. A board-up standing longer than six consecutive months satisfies the dilapidated-building definition on its own, with no finding about the building's physical condition.
• Watch for quarterly statements at the mortgage holder's address. The ordinance mails them to the lender as well as the owner, and six months from the mailing date turns the assessment into a lien coequal with property taxes.
• Budget the release fee into any disposition. Removal from the list turns on the building's condition at the petition hearing; the release of lien waits on full payment, and Sec. 60-35-21 sets a maximum administrative cost of $550.00.

Tulsa approaches the same problem from the registration side — Tulsa's vacant building ordinance puts the filing duty on the owner — so a portfolio spread across both Oklahoma metros is managing two genuinely different compliance models, not one state standard with local variations. Grounds conditions follow a third track again, under the summary abatement authority in 11 O.S. Sec. 22-111.

Ethreon runs vacant property inspections, board-up and securing work across Oklahoma City. What keeps a building off the abandoned building list is unglamorous: openings that are actually secured, documented monthly, with the board-up dated so it does not age into a dilapidation finding.