Battling blight

How does a small town get rid of blighted properties?

Ask Ami Huffman.

Better yet, says Huffman, ask Jack Robbins.

Robbins, a member of Dunkirk City Council, has played the leading role in his community when it comes to blight removal. He’s been at it for nearly a decade, and the number of properties he’s had a part in cleaning up is on its way to 30.

“You’ve got to clean your properties up,” says Robbins. “You’ve got to give people a reason to move here.”

“I became health and safety officer in 2010,” he recalls.

His job had four phases: Identifying blighted properties, getting control of those properties, demolition and clean-up.

Identifying local blight was the easy part. A number of houses which had been damaged by fire had simply been abandoned; the owners lacked the fire insurance coverage necessary to rebuild and repair.

“All of these were unsavable,” says Robbins.

But control, he says, was the key.

Once he’d identified properties that needed to be torn down, he kept a close eye on the county’s delinquent tax sale. When a property on his list was being sold for back taxes, Robbins would go to Dunkirk City Council and ask for a green light to proceed.

He’d then approach Jay County Commissioners, asking that the properties be deeded over to the city. Commissioners readily agreed, because they knew that was the fastest way to get the properties back on the tax rolls.

But in those early years, Robbins was limited in what he could do. The City of Dunkirk had budgeted $4,000 a year for blight removal, and those funds didn’t go very far.

“I could barely get one house torn down,” says Robbins, even using city employees to help with the labor. Still, he managed to remove six or seven eyesore houses over the first few years.

That all changed in 2015 when the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority awarded Dunkirk a $190,000 blight removal grant secured by Huffman, the county’s community developer.

“Our first round was funded in 2015,” Huffman recalls. That was when Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann was in office, and blight removal was a high priority. “It was Sue Ellspermann’s baby.”

But while the grant was welcome, the paperwork and rules related to the use of federal Housing and Urban Development funds administered by the state were overwhelming.

“It’s a complicated process,” Huffman says, with a degree of understatement. “A lot of communities have given up.”

Working with Robbins, who is now Dunkirk’s blight administrator, Huffman says the grant-funded project followed the same process he had already established.

But there were more complications. The state wanted details on each of the houses penciled in for demolition: Did the house have lead paint? Was there asbestos involved? Had the house been home to methamphetamine users? Had there been squatters on the property? Had animals gotten into the house?

Each detail resulted in points, and all those points were then reviewed by IHDCA staff.

Again, Dunkirk focused on properties that were on the tax sale list, with the county deeding them over to the city and the city, in turn, deeding them over to the Dunkirk Industrial Development Corporation.

The reason for that last move was to make it easier to dispose of the property after it had been cleaned up. Municipalities have multiple hoops to jump through when selling real estate.

After the properties were under control and the list had been approved, IHDCA put a mortgage and two notes on each piece of property.

Then, when it was time to put the project up for bid, there was so much information about each of the properties that Huffman needed to create a website.

“That’s so they know what they have to remediate,” she says.

Huffman adds, “I have documentation for each property.”