City paid nearly a million dollars for now-vacant lot

Lakewood owns this $950,000 vacant lot at 1290 Harlan Street.

LAKEWOOD – The City owns one of the priciest parcels of vacant land in Jefferson County, a 1.8-acre site at 1290 Harlan St. that cost taxpayers nearly a million dollars.

After the city purchased the site, three buildings that came with the land were razed. The lot now stands vacant, occupied only by “no motorized vehicles” and “No Parking” signs.

County property records show City Hall paid $950,000 for the Harlan Street property. The now-vacant lot is valued by the County Assessor’s Office at $57,000. When the three buildings were standing, the assessor pegged their “actual value” at $304,900, less than a third of what the city paid.

Assessor’s valuations generally are conservative and market conditions can vary. But the price the city paid is far outside the margin of error.

As it turned out, the site was never was suitable for records storage, said Lakewood Police Division Chief Michelle Tovrea.

“Those buildings turned out to be in very poor shape and we ended up not being able to use them for what the Police Department was looking for,” she said. “They were in very bad shape. I think one of them had suffered a structure fire at one time and three or four of the walls in the larger one were not safe.”

City Council actually agreed to buy the parcel twice, once in 2007 when city staff touted the site as a perfect spot for storing police records and again in 2008 because, City Manager Mike Rick said, the City needed the site for an easement for drainage work.

The purchase, City Hall said, would trigger more than $1,000,000 in “storm-water mitigation improvements” on Dry Gulch by the Regional Transportation District. RTD’s FasTracks light rail line will be next to the property.

But just an easement wasn’t enough: The entire parcel ought to be purchased and the city could hold it for unspecified “city uses”, Rock told Council before the second vote to acquire the property.

State law forbids cities to purchase land for speculative reasons and requires parcels purchased by governments to be used for a “public purpose.”

City Councilman Doug Anderson said city staff  told him the city would get a credit for the cost of the land through the city’s cost-sharing agreement with the transportation agency.

The city also got $50,000 from Urban Drainage and Flood Control as partial repayment for the drainage easement.

Anderson questioned the propriety of purchasing property without identifying a specified “public use.”

“It is inappropriate for the City to be speculating on property. That’s the essence of my frustration with it,” Anderson said.

Councilwoman Vicki Stack, who raised concern about the speculative nature of the purchase before the purchase was approved, did not return calls for comment.

The purpose definitely is not the police-storage concept: The city now is looking at another site on Parfet Street at a price of just under $2 million, according to documents obtained by the EDGE.

Neighbors of the Harlan Street property were surprised the city spent nearly a million dollars for the parcel and questioned the need for drainage work. One man who has worked nearby for 37 years said the drainage problems are limited to a few inches of water pooling at the intersection and that Dry Gulch hasn’t left its banks since he’s been there.

The water running through Dry Gulch now is channeled underground beneath 1290 Harlan, a neighbor said.

The Police Department outgrew its current storage space because the need to retain evidence and documents has grown with the complexity of prosecuting criminal cases, former Police Chief Ron Burns told City Council in 2007.

Tovrea said the 31,781 square-foot building on Parfet Street would provide plenty of storage space for current needs as well as plenty of room for the future.

“It has approximately 25,000 square feet of warehouse room with, I believe, 20-foot ceilings,” she said. “It would be a big help to the custodians of our property and evidence to be able to work with a room that size because of the constraints on us and the things we are having to keep now keep growing and growing.”