Empty eyesores

They stand vacant among filled buildings.
Though once these buildings housed thriving companies, they now are only the skeletons of what they used to be: a furniture store and a local restaurant.
“Unfortunately a lot of them have been vacant way too long,” said Portland Mayor Randy Geesaman.
“Way too long” means about four years for the structure at 201 through 207 W. Main St., known as the Bailey Building. Bailey Furniture closed in 1999, but the building was rented out as a flea market.
The building that once housed Tom & Rod’s Steak House at 214 through 216 W. Main St. has been vacant for almost five years.
Information from the Jay County auditor’s office shows the owner of Tom & Rod’s building, Rodney L. Renbarger, has missed some tax payments. His balance due with penalties is $1,350.21.
The company with ownership of the Bailey building, Baileys of Portland, Inc., did not pay its fall 2014 taxes for all three blocks of the location. It owes a total of $1,468.31 in fees and penalties.
Greg Bailey, president of Baileys of Portland, Inc., declined to comment about the property. Efforts to reach Renbarger were unsuccessful.

Tom & Rod’s
Tom & Rod’s was built between February 1886 and November 1892. It has housed a grocery store, restaurant, drug store and electric supply outlet. In the early 1990s, it was refurbished into apartments.
In 2011, Tom & Rod’s experienced significant damage because of flooding in the downtown area and has since been unoccupied.
Gary Loy, owner of Loy Real Estate and Auction, said he attempted to sell the property once before but could not after discovering five to seven liens on the building totaling about $30,000.
That’s “more than what the building is worth,” Loy said.
The liens come from finance and credit card companies like Chase and Discover. The only ways to remove the liens are through tax or sheriff’s sales.
Jay County Treasurer Robin Alberson said the county can put the Tom & Rod’s property up for tax sale in October and if not sold, an optional certificate sale in March 2017 would occur for 10 percent of the minimum bid at the tax sale.
Alberson said the liens do not affect the sale, but the county would advise whoever purchases the property to get a lawyer to see what liens are on the building. There is a one-year tax redemption period to obtain the property with a tax sale. In a sheriff’s sale, the deed is available immediately.
Geesaman thinks the Tom & Rod’s building should be torn down, believing the parking lot to its west, at the intersection of Main and Ship streets, would make a great place to start a new business.

Bailey Furniture
The Bailey Building was built around 1885. Each section was designed to hold two first-floor commercial spaces, and over time held a variety of businesses including a drug store, cigar shop and printing services.
Like Tom & Rod’s, the Bailey Building sustained flood damage in 2011, but had already showed signs of neglect.
At the southwest corner of Main and Commerce streets, the Bailey property is deteriorating on the outside, and the sidewalk has been blocked off, warning pedestrians to avoid it because of the risk of falling bricks. The hope was to have a Ratio Architects, an engineering firm, establish the property as a safety hazard, Geesaman noted, but it was unable to do so.
“Our commercial ordinances are not tough enough to allow us to just go through the process unless we have an engineer that’s actually saying it’s an unsafe building,” said Geesaman. “Our only choice now is if we get some other city’s ordinances that’s really strict so we could force the action and what we have is not strong enough,” to get the owner to make a decision on the property.
By “forcing the action,” Geesaman means condemning the property and tearing it down.
It’s estimated it would cost about $150,000 to demolish the property, but destroying it may affect the integrity of the other businesses the area. The city’s demolition fund only amounts to about $10,000, and finding more funding is difficult, Geesaman said. The property will be eligible for tax sale in 2017 if back taxes and penalties aren’t paid by that time.
At one point, the owner of the Bailey Building asked if the city would be interested in taking possession of the property, Geesaman said.
The mayor noted that Portland Redevelopment Commission has the ability to acquire the property, but doing so without a plan is risky. But it’s unclear whether it would make more sense to try to rehabilitate the building or tear it down, and obtaining ownership without a plan is risky.
“And that’s why no decision has been made on Bailey Furniture because those are very big question marks — do we venture down that road or not,” he said.
Both locations are in Portland’s historic preservation district, which could further complicate any effort to tear down the buildings.

Redevelopment
Ami Huffman, director of community development for Jay County Development Corporation, said Portland Redevelopment Commission had a study conducted in 2014 to see if the locations were repairable for a reasonable price.
A study by Ratio Architects, showed the mechanical, electrical and plumbing costs for Tom & Rod’s would range from $222,000 to $306,000. For the Bailey property, it would be $575,000 to $790,000.
And with the properties in private hands, the city is limited to what it can do.
If the owners were interested, Portland could offer redevelopment funds like those from the Downtown Façade Funding Program for buildings in the Historic Preservation District. But that grant is only a 50 percent match of up to $15,000 for a structure’s exterior.
Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA) programs could offer some assistance, but Huffman said, she has not seen anything that could fully meet the needs of redevelopment for those buildings.
“(Portland’s façade funding program) is only exterior,” she said. “We can help with the exterior facing, but on the interior it’s really hard to find funding — really hard. I’m having that same problem in Dunkirk with the Stewart Brothers building.”
Huffman said she has been trying to find funding for the Stewart Brothers building for at least five years, and it was included in both of Dunkirk’s applications to earn OCRA’s Stellar Communities designation.
Geesaman hoped to bring in redevelopment firms that would be interested in rehabilitating the buildings. But that notion was put on the backburner so he could focus more attention on reducing flooding.
He said he plans to bring in companies like Martin Riley Architects of Fort Wayne and Augusta Consulting of Muncie to make presentations on revitalization plan ideas, with their costs, to the redevelopment commission within the next two months.
Kent McClung, a member of Portland City Council, said the issue of the Bailey building was brought to the attention of council about two years ago. He described it as “in limbo.”
McClung said since the buildings are still in the hands of private owners, there isn’t a lot that can be done except to enforce ordinances.
“It’s slow motion all around,” he said. “It’s a slow motion deterioration and it’s slow motion going through tax sales. So you wait for them not to pay taxes and then the county tries to put it up for tax sale.”
“I’d like to see the problem solved,” said McClung, “And … we’re letting the administration take lead on this.”