EVANSVILLE - One of city government’s two announced initiatives to fight housing blight — converting the nonprofit Evansville Brownfields Corp. into a land bank — is hanging fire while political antagonists fight about how to fund it.
The other has remained on the back burner since it was unveiled in August 2014, with Mayor Lloyd Winnecke frankly acknowledging it could stay there for the foreseeable future.
Winnecke paused when asked whether he would, if re-elected, move forward in 2016 with plans to create a registry to penalize owners of perpetually vacant and abandoned housing units.
“Perhaps,” the mayor said. “I’m not trying to be coy, but I just don’t know — I have to sit down with the team and say, ‘OK, what’s physically possible to do, given the resources we have?’ ”
The registry would include an annual vacant housing ownership fee that would escalate every year a structure remains vacant. A fine would be assessed for failing to register a vacant housing unit on the registry’s website once an initial list of properties is created.
The proposal is modeled on a program initiated by officials of Wilmington, Delaware, and imitated by such cities as Altoona, Pennsylvania, and Revere, Massachussetts.
Wilmington’s program won the City Livability Award for outstanding achievement from the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Waste Management, Inc. Officials there have conducted seminars on it for the Conference of Mayors and the Ash Institute in Boston.
Wilmington officials told the Courier & Press in 2013 they were sick of watching the costs associated with chronically vacant buildings — code enforcement, police runs, court proceedings — drain city resources. They provided data showing the value of building permits for renovation and demolition obtained by owners of vacant properties had more than doubled since the vacant housing registry’s first full year. The property owners likely wanted to avoid annual ownership fees ranging from $500 in the first year to more than $5,000 annually for long-term vacant housing, they said.
Wilmington’s data also showed that the city’s longest-standing vacant structures had been dramatically reduced in number.
In addition, the vacant housing registry actually made money for the city of Wilmington, with fee collection far outstripping the reported program costs.
Asked about Wilmington’s initiative, Evansville city officials responded at first by expressing reservations about the cost of implementing a similar vacant housing registry. City officials ultimately announced in August 2014 that they would follow suit with a registry of their own.
But it hasn’t happened.
Three months after their announcement, city officials said they had been compelled to focus first on revision of the city’s mandatory rental registry for owners of multiunit rental properties.
Winnecke recently cited the city’s pursuit of reimbursement of $2.2 million from the Indiana Hardest Hit Fund Blight Elimination Program, federally administered state money that was awarded in two rounds in 2014. City officials have said the money, which will fund the razing of at least 113 vacant and blighted structures over the next two years, came with considerable strings attached: legal costs, environmental costs, asbestos removal and other state requirements. The application process also came with stringent deadlines.
The money, part of almost $19.9 million for which Evansville-Vanderburgh County competed with a dozen other Indiana counties, isn’t intended solely to destroy buildings that are health or safety hazards. It is designed to help “program partners” — primarily nonprofits and community development corporations — acquire the properties and carry out plans in neighborhoods they’ve already invested in by acquiring land or rehabilitating structures.
City officials had to identify the program partners, solicit their participation and guide them through a state approval process.
Winnecke said it was worth all the trouble to get that much money that the city could direct toward demolitions.
“We got the Hardest Hit fund sort of dropped in our lap, and we kind of put all hands on deck,” he said. “And I think this is another situation where this may take priority over (the vacant housing registry).
“Certainly the last several weeks, I’ve asked our group of leaders within city government to work on this (Indiana Hardest Hit Fund Blight Elimination Program) project, and that’s what they’ve been working on. Can we do both? Maybe. I don’t know yet, but based on what we’ve seen in the two phases of the Hardest Hit fund, we have a huge opportunity. I think this is a chance to get some low-hanging fruit here.”
Unlike the proposed vacant housing registry, the land bank idea is very much in play — for the moment, anyway.
The Republican mayor and Democrats on the City Council are at loggerheads over how to pay for the $1.7 million initiative, which would kick off with a demolition offensive aimed at tearing down nearly 2,000 dilapidated structures in five years.
Winnecke has said newly available riverboat money is “the most logical funding source,” but the council Democrats insist he shoehorn the anti-blight campaign’s $1.5 million riverboat portion into his proposed 2016 regular budget — a prospect the mayor says would jeopardize city employees’ jobs.
Operating as a land bank, Brownfields would acquire vacant, abandoned and blighted structures and would bank and maintain the newly empty lots and structures deemed salvageable. It would demolish dilapidated houses and seek buyers for structures deemed salvageable. The goal would be to combine large enough tracts of land to attract developers.
Evansville will receive at least an extra $1.5 million in riverboat money next year — money Winnecke calls a perfectly timed stroke of luck with which the city could seize the day by launching a long overdue war on housing blight.
2015 is the fifth and final year that Tropicana Evansville can deduct $2 million from its rent payment, having advanced the city $10 million in 2010. The city will get a full payment next year and in subsequent years.
But City Council Finance Chairman Conor O’Daniel insists the riverboat fund must be protected so it is available to absorb such capital expenses as fire equipment, fire apparatus and police cars. O’Daniel said a land bank would not be a capital investment, a requirement that City Council members imposed in 1996 on the use of riverboat money.
Winnecke administration officials counter that the demolition of dilapidated buildings and the acquisition of property are unquestionably capital expenses.
The mayor’s aides also argue that the city has enough riverboat money to simultaneously pay for the anti-blight land bank and meet capital needs. They report the city’s riverboat account ended 2014 with $14.2 million, with several million dollars in unencumbered reserves. The 2014 end-of-year balance compares to $14.1 million in 2011, $15.2 million in 2012 and $14 million in 2013. The city receives about $12 million per year for playing host to the riverboat.
The argument is unresolved, pending further 2016 budget negotiations.