Hidden away in the Colorado Capitol is an unclaimed property vault containing such curiosities as a souvenir hatchet from George Washington’s inauguration, military medals, a 6.5-carat canary-yellow diamond ring, and two silver bars awaiting claim.
The items are among about 5 million unclaimed properties that employees of the state Treasury Department’s Unclaimed Property Division hope to reunite with Coloradans through the program known as the Great Colorado Payback, State Treasurer Dave Young said.
Tuesday was the second National Unclaimed Property Day, and Young said an estimated one in 10 people has unclaimed property owned by the state.
“We clearly have a lot of unclaimed property and our mission is to reunite people with that unclaimed property,” Young said.
Helen H Richardson, The Denver Post
Collectible baseball cards from the 1950’s, vintage bills, large silver bars weighing over 15 pounds on the left and over 40 pounds on the right, military medals and a cast-iron hatchet from the 1789 inauguration of President George Washington are just a few of the many items which are currently unclaimed as of January 31, 2022 at the Colorado State Treasurer’s office at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver.
He encouraged people to visit colorado.findyourunclaimedproperty.com to find out if unclaimed property is waiting for them.
Businesses, nonprofits, and other groups may also have unclaimed property, as the department’s website lists more than 1.7 million names of individuals and companies for which property is available.
Most of the property is money, Young said, but some of the rare items the department received — including a $500 bill, emerald jewels, international coins and vintage baseball cards — came from lockers.
Safe deposit boxes will be transferred to the state after owners haven’t paid fees for them for five years and the bank can’t locate the owners, said Bianca Gardelli, director of unclaimed properties.
“Usually someone stopped paying because they passed. It’s very common,” Gardelli said.
Once the state receives the contents of the safe deposit box, the unclaimed real estate department staff will begin their own search for the rightful owners of the property.
In recent years, the department has sent notices, including emails, postcards, and letters, to prospective owners of unclaimed items. These notifications include a property ID number to make it easier to track the property on the department’s website — and to ensure recipients know the notification isn’t fraudulent, Gardelli said.
Some efforts to reunite the owners with their property have been unsuccessful, as in the case of the canary yellow diamond ring the department has owned since 2002. But in the last fiscal year, about $43 million was returned to 23,462 claimants, state officials said. Returned lockers were not evaluated in this total.
“None of this gets valued at all unless we actually go to the auction,” Gardelli said of the rare vault items.
The state hasn’t held a major auction since 1998, Gardelli said, but the department has sold some items through eBay when the items’ owners were unknown.
The money made from those sales will not go into the state’s general fund unless it is determined by a court proceeding that there will be no one to come forward and claim the property, Gardelli said — and that is rare. Instead, the earnings are usually deposited into a bank account held by the state indefinitely for an individual to eventually claim.
The department is considering holding an auction in the future, Gardelli said, but because of COVID-19, the department is still catching up on its inventory. “So we’ve been really working on organizing it and establishing what we have in there,” Gardelli said of the vault.
Any items that were formerly claimed, as well as rare and sentimental items, will never be offered for auction, Gardelli said.
Holding items with sentimental value is important, Young said, because an item’s value to a person can exceed its monetary value.
For example, Gardelli said it was common for the department to receive dollar bills with silver certificates. On one occasion, a woman came to claim the contents of her father’s locker, and inside the box was a $1 bill that Gardelli described as “literally black.”
“I pull out this dollar bill and she says, ‘There it is,'” Gardelli chuckled. “And she says, ‘My dad used to be a farmer and he carried this dollar bill in his pocket every day and we didn’t know where he was going.’
Helen H Richardson, The Denver Post
Colorado State Department of Treasury Communications Director Sheena Kadi looks at unclaimed items held in the vault of the Colorado State Treasurer’s Office at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on January 31, 2022.
“Even if it’s that simple, you don’t know what it was for the family.”
Young recalled the story of a woman who kept money in a coffee can in her kitchen unbeknownst to her family. When it was full, she put it in a savings account but didn’t tell the bank who the heirs were. After she died and the money was transferred to the Unclaimed Property Department, Gardelli found the three siblings who were the heirs to the savings account, which by then totaled $250,000.
“Not everyone has $250,000 of unclaimed property waiting for them, but most of it is money and you never know until you actually file and see a claim,” Young said.
If an individual has a relatively small amount of money in unclaimed property, their claim can be approved electronically, Gardelli said, adding that the department was able to automatically approve about 700 claims as of Monday.
The number of approved applications is increasing every year, Gardelli said, which is a positive as the vault gets too crowded. She said she doesn’t want to auction locker items because those things belong to people. But if items are not collected, they will eventually have to be auctioned off.
“We need people to come forward and collect their family’s belongings,” Gardelli said.
Comments are closed.