Scott Swanson
Linn County Board of Commissioners, on Feb. 1, reviewed two bids for some 150 acres of the former Willamette Industries mill site in Sweet Home.
At the commissioners meeting, county Property Manager Rachel Adamec opened a bid of $800,000 from Sweet Home Real Estate Restorations LLC, whose principal is Joshua Victor of Sweet Home, and $450,000 from Sweet Home Mill Site LLC, whose principal is Scott Lepman of Albany.
Victor’s bid included a cashier’s check for the full amount of the bid and Lepman’s check was for $45,000, or 10% of the bid. The property is being sold “as is.”
The property has a real market value of $1,646,550, but the minimum acceptable bid was set at $406,087.
Adamec and County Attorney Gene Karandy were reviewing the bids and were to make a recommendation to the commissioners at their Feb. 8 meeting, (which occurred after The New Era went to press).
Linn County took possession of the site approximately 11 years ago for more than $500,000 in back taxes. The property was part of a planned, but failed, 430-acre housing project by Western States Land Reliance Trust.
The mill property, along the north side of Sweet Home, between 18th Avenue and Clark Mill Road, had been part of a larger master plan developed by Dan Desler, Troy Cummings, Development by Design and Western States Land Reliance Trust. Plans had included commercial development, residential housing and, even at one point, a hotel and golf course.
However, by 2010, WSLRT and its principal, Desler, owed six years of property tax, approximately $505,000, and despite assurances from Desler that the money would be paid, it wasn’t and the county foreclosed at the end of that year.
Linn County recently agreed to give the city of Sweet Home about three acres for possible development of a homeless encampment.
Over the years, Linn County has worked with the Department of Environmental Quality and former owner Weyerhaeuser, identifying and mitigating contaminated areas of the property. Commissioner Will Tucker has focused on that work and has said he believes final environmental clearances were coming within the year.
Sale of the property will remove Linn County from that process.
The county has previously offered the property for sale and at one point received four bids, but turned them down. At another auction, the minimum bid was set at $2.7 million and attracted no bidders.
The county had considered selling individual parcels, but members of the Sweet Home City Council asked that the property be sold as one unit. Linn County was concerned that if sold as one unit, the purchaser could partition contaminated areas and not pay taxes on them. In six years, Linn County could be forced to take over those parcels in lieu of back taxes.
Linn County had also offered to give the property to the city of Sweet Home, but the offer was rejected because city councilors were concerned that environmental cleanup cost could be expensive.
Although the city expressed interest in the property within weeks of the foreclosure, what has amounted to 11 years of intermittent back-and-forth has taken place between the county, the city and the Sweet Home Economic Development Group over what to do with the property, the city later deciding it didn’t want ownership of the western portion containing the former mill site. It has take ownership of the eastern portion, which includes a former gravel quarry and ponds, which is intended one day to be a park and site for Oregon Jamboree events.
The mill property, which needs cleanup from toxins remaining from forest products industries activities, has proved more problematic.
Most recently, Sweet Home city councilors have made two demands in the past two months, one to sell the land in a contiguous piece and the second, on Jan. 27, to require a buyer of the land to continue the investigation and cleanup of the property.
“This whole thing has taken on a life of its own,” said Roger Nyquist, chair of the Linn County Commission, on Friday.
He described the process of trying to get the property sold as “a difficult and challenging situation,” particularly in recent months. But with local housing prices having “gone through the roof,” he said, it needs to get into private hands.
The goal from the beginning, he said, has been to get the property “cleaned up and utilized as a resource for the community,” and the county is focused now on getting it back into the private sector, so “people invest money and build houses and do those kinds of things so that the property becomes an asset to the community.”
The delays in getting the land sold have resulted in lost tax revenue to local taxing districts, including the City of Sweet Home, the Sweet Home School District, the Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District and Linn County, for about 18 years.
Nyquist said it is difficult to estimate what the losses have been, since the property hasn’t been in private hands and still requires some cleanup, noting that the county was owed half a million dollars when it foreclosed.
“We can only tax it to what value is there,” he said. “It’s hard to measure that.”
The cleanup needs and timing of some of the city’s qualification requests have complicated that process.
“It’s our job to take input and try to do what we think is best,” he said. “The timing of input at times limits our opportunity to make use of that input.”
Nyquist said all the public players in the situation ultimately have the same goal, which is what the commission is working toward: getting the land ownership privatized.
“While today this is a difficult and challenging situation, I think over time it will work out for the best, in part because of the shared goals and visions that the Board of Commissioners and City Council and SHEDG had for 11 years.
“We’ve come a long way. When someone’s running a marathon, you don’t turn around and admire the miles that have gone by. You try to get through the last mile and hope it doesn’t kill you. This is a little bit like that.”
Nyquist said Friday he was still waiting to hear what the commission’s options are.
“My question today is what we are legally bound to do,” he said. “That decision could be made as soon as Tuesday.”
– Alex Paul, Linn County Communications Officer, contributed to this story.