City OKs Cedar St. Bridge trade
SANDPOINT — The city parted ways with an historic piece of Sandpoint property Wednesday night, trading the Cedar Street Bridge to a pair of local developers for a parcel of land near City Hall.
The council voted unanimously to approve the deal, with Councilwoman Helen Newton voting via telephone from Alaska, where she is on vacation. Councilman Michael Boge was absent.
The trade comes in the wake of a failed attempt to negotiate a lease extension for the property. John Gillham and Jeff Bond purchased the Cedar Street Bridge Market in 2005 for a reported $2.6 million, but paid the city $1 per year to lease the actual bridge and a small portion of land.
For months, Gillham and Bond worked with the city on a new deal that would have allowed the property to be condominiumized and would have expanded the lease to 99 years, with five 10-year renewals.
Once the bridge was condominiumized, lease payments would have jumped from $1 per year to an estimated $11,890 per year, according city documents. In all, the city would have generated an estimated $154,570 in net revenue during the first 13 years of the lease, according to a memo released by city attorney Will Herrington.
Lease negotiations stalled in June, and Bond and Gillham eventually pulled their proposal from the council’s agenda. Shortly thereafter, Gillham said he and Bond were contacted by a council member with the idea to trade the bridge property for a plot of land located at the northeast corner of Ella Avenue and Superior Street. Both properties are valued at $135,000, according to city documents. While the city-owned portion of the bridge property has a relatively small value, the value of the entire Cedar Street Bridge Market is estimated at $3,963,400, according Herrington’s memo.
Although he supported the trade, Councilman John Reuter lamented what he called the city’s poor decision-making in its attempts to renegotiate the lease. He said the council should have been able to put together a deal that benefited all parties.
“I think what we see here with this particular parcel, the Cedar Street Bridge, is a case, as Ronald Reagan might say, of the government being the problem and not the solution,” he said. “The solution right now for our downtown, which desperately needs all the help we can give it, is for government to get out of the way and allow these property owners the ability to move forward from where they’re at.”
He admitted it wasn’t the best case scenario, but Reuter said the trade does have bright spots. He specifically pointed to a part of the deal that requires Bond and Gillham to maintain a pedestrian pathway across the bridge.
After the vote, Mayor Gretchen Hellar voiced reservations about the trade.
“We’ve been in a situation where we have had to trade a property that was capable of generating revenue, no matter how small, for a property that’s going to cost us to demolish the buildings on it and make it ready for resale or trade,” Hellar said. “I think we’ve probably all learned our lesson, I hope.”
The city has not specified what it will do with its new property, but Reuter said at some point in the future he would like to trade the lot for a piece of land that could be designated as a city park.