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Last Tuesday, the City Council backed the Mayor’s plan to not reduce the city’s real estate tax rate and also approved his mysterious lack of a plan to purchase the 96-acre Altria property that most recently had been held captive as the preferred site for the casino, before that plan failed at the ballot box (twice).
The city has now committed to spend $5.5 million to buy the property and another $4 million (at least) to tear down the existing office complex on site that was built in 1982. Even though the second casino referendum failed a year ago, this “deal” was rushed together; it was introduced at a special meeting of Council on October 7th and the legislative body was told by Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Lincoln Saunders that the deal had to be approved by November 12th (the same deadline as the tax rate decision). Deputy CAO Sharon Ebert told Council the city had a “very narrow window” to buy or Altria might sell it to a private buyer instead.
So why the rush? The city surely had some master plan ready to unveil and do something amazing with the land that sits surrounded by other industrial properties and is, in fact, zoned for industrial use. Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reported that Saunders said, “We do not have a defined tenant or a defined plan. The goal would be to go out and see what are some of the best offers and best opportunities we can get. But if we don’t control the property, we don’t have any role to play in that potential development and to ensure that we get that type of development that we’re looking for.”
BizSense also reported that Ebert told Council, “There’s a high likelihood that if we don’t get to purchase this, it might be developed as a warehouse,” Ebert said. “And that is not what we think is the highest and best use.”
Ebert did not say what the highest and best use was, but clearly, to her (and her bosses), a warehouse in an industrial corner of the city that is surrounded by other warehouses that employ hundreds of people with good paying jobs surely is not a preferred option. Despite Saunders’ and Ebert’s “Who’s on first?” routine for something grand to be built on the property, a warehouse is exactly how the property has been marketed by Altria as an “industrial land development opportunity.” Not to mention, the city zoned the property for industrial use and it sits less than a mile from the Port of Richmond which is part of the Port of Virginia network that can import and export goods anywhere in the world.
One of Richmond’s most frustrating characteristics is to write or develop a good plan and then ignore it and put it on the shelf to collect dust; that theorem has been proven true yet again in the case of this $10 million purchase. The Richmond Regional Transportation Planning Organization (RRTPO) conducted the Commerce Corridor Study Technical Report in 2017 that identified how to best position properties in that part of Richmond and Chesterfield and making transportation improvements to serve those areas and market them to job creation opportunities.
And what do you know? That report identified the parcels there as being a great site for exactly what was developed there. The 96-acre parcel the city just bought used to be larger — but Altria split off part of it and sold 62 acres in 2017 that were adjacent to it along Interstate 95, and guess what was built? Two warehouses. Go figure.
A California company bought vacant land in an industrial area zoned for industry next to a global port network and the land is now occupied with two 461,000 square foot warehouses that are distribution centers — one for Amazon and the other for office electronics company Brother International. Those two structures employ about 250 people and the assessed value of both is over $87 million, which means they pay just over $1 million in real estate taxes (and even more when you add on machinery and tools taxes). The company built the warehouses and received no city subsidy outside of
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