Alan DiPietro sued the Town of Bolton in January 2023, alleging an unconstitutional taking after Bolton acquired title to his home — allegedly worth at least $370,000 — to satisfy a tax debt of approximately $60,000, and allegedly retained the surplus equity. DiPietro contends that Bolton's retention of the value exceeding his tax liability violated the Fifth Amendment's just-compensation requirement. He continues to reside on the property, and the parties do not dispute that no foreclosure sale has occurred.
The case has been overtaken by two developments. First, the Supreme Court held in Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598 U.S. 631 (2023), that retaining surplus proceeds from a tax foreclosure sale constitutes a taking under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Second, the Massachusetts Legislature amended Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 60, § 64 in 2024 — after the events at issue — to require return of surplus proceeds to the delinquent taxpayer, with the amendment potentially applying retroactively.
Judge Margaret R. Guzman of the District of Massachusetts declined to adopt Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy's Report and Recommendation, which had recommended granting Bolton's motion for summary judgment and denying Bolton's motion to authorize a sale as moot. Instead, the court denied both Bolton's summary-judgment motion and its motion to authorize a sale as moot, without prejudice to renewal, and ordered supplemental briefing.
The court identified two threshold questions: whether the statutory amendment has rendered DiPietro's claims moot, and whether a compensable taking has occurred at all or instead remains unripe, given that no sale has taken place and no surplus proceeds have been retained. The court noted that, under relevant precedent, an actionable taking may require that a former property holder actually not receive remaining proceeds from a foreclosure and sale.
The parties were ordered to submit supplemental briefs of no more than fifteen pages by April 16, 2026, addressing what statutory remedies are presently and prospectively available to DiPietro under the amended statute to recover any excess equity, whether those remedies are exclusive, and whether any applicable deadlines for seeking such relief have expired.
The order also included a pointed warning to DiPietro's counsel about misquotations in the objections to the R&R. The court identified multiple instances where counsel attributed language to cited authorities — including Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U.S. 180 (2019) — that does not appear in those decisions. The court cautioned that such misstatements of law, whether attributable to carelessness or reliance on unverified generative AI outputs, are unacceptable and may implicate several rules of professional conduct, including the duty of candor under Mass. R. Pro. Conduct 3.3(a), and reserved the possibility of addressing the issue by separate order.