Land bank working to clean up blight areas

EDITOR'S NOTE: This week we will take a look back at some of the biggest stories in our area in 2022.

ZANESVILLE − In less than a year, the Muskingum County land bank and its partners, the City of Zanesville, and the Muskingum County Commissioners, saw the completion of one major blight removal project and the start of two others.

This spring, SafeCo Environmental Inc. wrapped up the surface cleanup of the former Lear property on Linden Avenue in Zanesville. The city awaits the results of a second phase of subsurface testing to determine the next steps for the property.

Zanesville Mayor Don Mason said the successful cleanup of 2200 Linden Avenue shows the value of the Muskingum County land bank as a tool to help improve the community. It also highlights the cooperation between city and county and various organizations funded by the two entities.

After the land bank took possession of the former Munson Elementary School on Brighton Boulevard and the former Mosaic Tile factory on Pershing Road, land bank executive director Andrew Roberts expected the cleanup process to take longer than it will. Both properties are expected to be cleared by the spring.

The city was the partner the land bank was looking for to get the property cleaned up, Roberts said. "Our biggest fear was basically ending up with another entity like the one we had before," he said, referring to an LLC that previously owned the property. Pelican Land Holdings LLC and a group of other connected companies are being sued by the Ohio Attorney General's office for failing to clean up both the former Lear property and the former Mosaic Tile factory site. Both properties were left in a state of disrepair when the ownership started to demolish them to recover building materials but failed to finish the job.

"There have been rumblings over the last three years that some kind of money was going to become available for brownfield remediation," Roberts said. "When we took ownership of Munson and Mosaic, we weren't sure when or if that money would become available."

The Ohio legislature poured money into brownfield remediation this year, and the land bank was well positioned to take advantage, Roberts said.

In 2020, the land bank worked to get a portion of Delinquent Tax and Assessment Collection, or DTAC funds. Whenever a property owner pays delinquent taxes, the land bank gets five cents of every dollar. They also get 5% of the proceeds from a tax sale, after various costs. That equates to about $200,000 a year, Roberts said. Those funds started to accrue on Jan. 1, 2021.

The plan was to build up the DTAC money to leverage against a bank loan to clean up Munson and Mosaic. Instead, the money was used as a match to the brownfield grants. "We leveraged $200,000 to get $1.85 million," Roberts said.

"Without that DTAC funding we would not have been able to do what we are doing now with Munson and Mosaic," Roberts said. "I am happy both are getting done, this is going to have a huge impact on that entire neighborhood from State Street all the way down to the fairgrounds along Brighton Boulevard. These things have been sitting there for at least 15 years in some state of disrepair. I hope the community around it is happy that we finally making movement on it."

When the land bank acquired the Mosaic Tile property, some 15 acres on the south size of Zanesville, they looked at several options for what to do with it. Already partially demolished, the land bank considered rehabbing the property to be warehousing. "When we looked at what class of warehousing that it would be, it would not have been cost effective to rehab those structures," Roberts said. In the middle of a densely populated neighborhood, the property doesn't lend itself to modern industrial use. "Whether it ends up being some type of light commercial, some type of housing, it will be some type of use that doesn't have truck traffic moving through neighborhoods all the time, that is what we are looking for," Roberts said.

Whatever it does become, the site will be remediated to EPA residential standards, Roberts said. The site has already the subject of an extensive environmental review, so the land bank and its contractor, SafeCo Environmental, know where the problem spots are.

"When we took ownership of Munson, we weren't entirely sure what we were going to do with it," Roberts said. The land bank studied the possibility of rehabilitating the property for housing, turning the school into an apartment building, but costs came back much higher than expected. "We had an architect and general contractor put a price on rehabbing it," Roberts said. "It came back at $360 a square foot. We can build for $175 a square foot from the ground up.

"We don't tear things down just for the sake of tearing things down," Roberts said, "But when we found out how much it would cost to rehab for 26 units, we decided it was time to drop it and market the property to someone who could redevelop the site as residential."

That someone was Woda Cooper, a Columbus development company that specializes in affordable housing. In the summer of 2021, the company and the land bank signed a purchase agreement for the property. In turn, Woda Cooper would apply for gap financing to help fund the project, which would build about 44 housing units on the site. That money came through this fall, and Roberts said he expects to turn the property over this spring, with Woda Cooper starting construction soon after.

The agreement calls for Woda Cooper to pay $50,000 for the property. "The land bank isn't here to make piles and piles of money off these sites," Roberts said. "We have a significant investment in these properties, our goal is turn them to some kind of productive use." He said the land bank has around $12,000 in administrative and maintenance costs in Mosaic and Munson. The land bank has spent nearly $37,000 on environmental testing for Mosaic, including both a phase one and a phase two assessment, which samples soil, water, and air at the site.

By the end of next year, Roberts expects construction on affordable housing at the former Munson Elementary site to be well underway. Both buildings will have been demolished, and the land bank will turn its attention to working with the city's community improvement corporation to build infill housing in the city.

"Single family, multi-family, a mix, trying to light a fire somewhere," Roberts said. "It is our intent to show we people that yes, you can build a house on a city lot, and it can have a good impact on some of these areas that have been overlooked for decades."

ccrook@gannett.com

740-868-3708

@crookphoto

This article originally appeared on Zanesville Times Recorder: Land bank working to clean up blight areas