“People’s Budget” Targets Empty Lots

Nobody likes vacant lots. But publish an online map identifying city-owned lots, and maybe more residents will come forward to buy, build, and return them to tax rolls.

That and other land management recommendations arose during a conversation with city staff about boosting revenue and cutting costs.

The conversation took place on Thursday night on the second floor of City Hall during the first meeting of the ​“People’s Budget Initiative,” a collaboration among the city’s community management teams and City Controller Daryl Jones, city Acting Budget Director Michael Gormany, and city Legislative Liaison Esther Armmand.

Running just under two hours long, the meeting brought together city financial officials and ten management team leaders from Newhallville, East Rock, East Shore, and beyond to discuss how best to craft a budget that will not unduly burden city taxpayers.

“This is the people’s budget,” Jones said. ​“We’re just stewards of it.”

Per city law, the mayor must present a first full draft of the budget to the Board of Alders by March 1.

While Thursday’s conversation bounced around between such topics as the state’s underfunding of the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program, the city’s efforts to ​“bend” ever-rising health care costs, and the promise of new technology to streamline city permitting services, the residents in the room often returned to property-based ideas for avoiding a rerun of last budget’s 11 percent tax increase.

“How do we have more dollars coming into the city,” Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris said, ​“so we can stop the bleeding?”

One idea, proposed by Newhallville management team member Nina Fawcett, is that the city publish an online map of vacant lots, and single out those that are owned by the city and that are for sale. That way residents have a clearer understanding of which empty parcels of land in their neighborhood are publicly owned and available for purchase from the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI).

With a map of such properties accessible via the city website, Fawcett said, ​“people can start eyeballing properties. They can start connecting vacant lots and make them viable.” Thereby replacing vacant parcels that often accumulate trash and debris and depress neighboring property values and turning them into new tax-contributing residences.

Jones said he would be happy to make such a map available on the city website. In fact, he said, vacant city-owned land is one of the data points that the city’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analyst has already plotted. All he has to do is push that map, currently reserved for city official view only, to a public-facing section of the site.

After a lengthy discussion about how roughly 55 percent of the city’s properties are not on the city’s tax rolls, thanks in large part to the high concentration of tax-exempt nonprofits like Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, Harris asked, ​“What about capping the number of nonprofits that come into New Haven?

“That’s hard,” Jones said. How could one legally exclude certain nonprofits from setting up in town?

Kevin McCarthy, the vice-chair of the East Rock Community Management Team and a former legislative staffer in Hartford, tweaked Harris’s question a bit. ​“We can determine,” he said, ​“who we sell city property to.”

He suggested that the city review its holdings of vacant lots, and also its policies around whom it sells to. Perhaps the city should hold off on selling publicly-owned properties at below-market prices to even worthwhile nonprofits, he said, since, after the sale and subsequent development, the property will still be tax exempt.

Jones agreed again. He said the city has already been reviewing just such a policy.

Which led McCarthy to yet another land-based revenue initiative, one that he recognized would likely not be the most popular in certain neighborhoods of the city.

“Everyone hates the reval,” McCarthy said, referring to the twice-a-decade citywide reassessment of property values. ​“Especially those of us who live in East Rock.”

But, he said, recent articles in the Independent have shown that some multifamily properties in the city have been selling for more than their city-appraised values. That could mean, he said, that many residential properties in the city are in fact more valuable than what the city thinks, and is taxing them at.

“It may be worth doing a property revaluation early,” McCarthy said.

Jones wrote down the idea, noting that, indeed, the city does not legally have to wait five years to do a property reval. It could do one every year, if it chose to.

At the end of the two-hour session, the management team chairs applauded Jones, Gormany, and Armmand for taking the time to listen to their ideas.

Looking out at the dozen people sitting around the table and the empty meeting room space behind them, Jones asked the group to reach out to neighbors and bring them to City Hall for the next ​“People’s Budget Initiative” meeting, which he said will take place sometime before March 1.

“I want this room to be full,” he said.