Land Bank meeting targets properties for possible demolition

The days are numbered for roughly 70 delinquent and vacant properties in Crawford County.

By Krystal Smalley
ksmalley@wbcowqel.com

The days are numbered for roughly 70 delinquent and vacant properties in Crawford County.

The Crawford County Land Reutilization Corporation received a $1,725,000 Neighborhood Initiative Program grant from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency in October and the land bank board is already hard at work targeting areas that need improvement.

“We have a targeted list of properties,” explained Gary Cole, chairman of the Crawford County Land Reutilization Corporation.

There were 69 properties submitted in the original grant, which focused on properties in Crestline, Galion, Bucyrus, and Tiro.

“That’s where the concentration of this type of property is,” Cole added. “There are a few isolated ones out in the county, but they are not in any big concentrated neighborhood that’s causing a devaluation of the property around them.”

Some of those properties on the original list, however, have since been or will be demolished through other funds, such as the Community Development Block Grant funds. Cole pointed out that the list comprised by the land bank is an ever-revolving one as properties are taken by other grant funds, qualify for rehabilitation rather than demolition, or do not meet the requirements needed. That opens up spaces later on for potentially more properties to be added to the list.

There are a number of factors that go into how the properties are selected, such as delinquent properties, the condition they are in, and whether they vacant. Cole said they also factor in the opinions of the neighbors and the input of the municipalities.

“When time goes on maybe some other part of the county might become more in need of this type of thing. We might expand the area in Galion a little bit, I don’t know,” Cole said. “We’ll see what happens as the time goes on because there’s an opportunity to upgrade our application later on and there’s more funds available possibly later on. But we don’t know that yet.”

Cole announced during the Crawford County Land Reutilization Corporation meeting Wednesday afternoon that the properties need to be under the land bank’s ownership by May 18, 2017. The land bank already has access to a few of the properties and took steps Wednesday to add more to be acquired, pending that they are suitable for demolition and acceptable end users are found.