BY TIMOTHY LAROCHE
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CLAREMONT — A spire of splintered wood and moldy drywall pokes through the snowpack where a house used be at 36 Sugar River Drive.
For years, the pile of rubble left over from a less-than-scrupulous demolition lies undeveloped and nearly undevelopable.
“We have dozens and dozens of these situations across the city and, in some cases, residents have become frustrated,” City Manager Ryan McNutt said. “They’ve become frustrated years ago.”
In a bid to turnover blighted buildings, city staff outlined on Wednesday the creation of a reserve fund to fuel clean-up efforts at city-owned properties.
The proposed Non-Capital Reserve Fund for Code Enforcement will move to the City Council Finance Committee on Tuesday before coming to a vote at the Feb. 28 City Council meeting.
The fund would enable city staff to earmark money made through the sale of tax-deeded properties for rehabilitation efforts at blighted properties owned by the city.
“This would be the opportunity to create a fund to be able to take quicker action and clean those things up,” McNutt said.
The city currently owns several properties that were possessed after the homeowners neglected to pay property taxes.
If property taxes are not paid by Dec. 1 in the year that a home’s value is assessed, the city can assign a lien to the homeowner lasting for 18 months. The lien is executed if taxes are not paid within that period. If taxes remain unpaid for two years following the execution, the deed is transferred and the city takes ownership of the property.
Each year, the city authorizes the sale of such properties through an auction. But in the case of blighted properties, Finance Director Mary Walter said, sales are infrequent because the properties are unattractive to investors. In many cases, the rehabilitation costs far exceed the value of the property, making the purchase risky for developers.
“We need to clean them up, because if we don’t, they just languish,” Walter said.
For instance, when the city pulled the tax deed on 36 Sugar River Drive, a 3,000-square-foot single family home stood on the property. Over the years without a sale, the house became blighted.
The house sold for $5,000 at auction in 2016 to an out-of-state investor but the new owner soon found that rehabilitation costs were steep. Assessment records of the property show that the value of the property was about $12,600, but replacement costs more than were $126,000.
“Once they realized that they didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything with it, they sold it to an even worse outside investor who promised to knock it down and clean it up,” McNutt said. “That pile of debris is still sitting there now because that property owner decided to be irresponsible. We can let it sit there or take action.”
The fund’s capacity would likely be capped at $500,000, McNutt said, with additional proceeds from property sales returned to the general fund. But with little precedent for how much money could be made through the sales, the city officials are left guessing how effective the fund would be.
“We take properties through tax title very infrequently and we sell them very infrequently… It’s not money we can expect to get year to year,” McNutt said. “That’s the best type of one-time money we can use for cleaning up the problems in the first place.”
Mayor Charlene Lovett recommended that the Finance Committee undertake more research on the proposal before any decisions are made. City councilors also pushed for the reworked resolution to have more specific wording before its passage.
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