The Junction City Commission by consensus has decided to leave lots in the Land Bank available for sale without special assessments. Those assessments are normally used to fund infrastructure related to the lots, but the City has several hundred of those lots available and they are not selling rapidly.

There was a push by a contingent of home owners in the Land Bank area to require the lots to be sold with the specials. They pay special assessments and are concerned that when the time comes to sell their homes they will not be able to do so since newer homes could potentially be built by developers and sold for less due to the lack of those assessments.

Mayor Pat Landes noted he wants to see the City succeed. “We have valuable resources here in these Land Bank lots. We just have so many of them, and that’s the issue. We will continue to beat the drum with our economic development folks to try to bring jobs here and get more people to come to Junction City.” Landes added the City wants to get the lots in play. “We are spending so much money just trying to take care of them, we’re not even doing much with them at all.”

Commissioner Jeff Underhill previous action did not help move lots and a stagnant economy was having more of an effect than the homes actually existing. “I still think that we need to try and eliminate the specials and move forward with what we had planned and marketing them that way, and trying to get out of the real estate business.”

Commissioner Tim Brown did suggest the possibility of placing special assessments on the lots for a reduced period of time, by prorating the specials for 10 years. But that idea did not gain approval of the other officials.

In order to authorize the sale of  the lots with special assessments on them the Commission would have to approve an ordinance at the time of the sale authorizing the sale of the lots with the assessments, but no action was taken..