As part of their agenda on Wednesday, the Summit County Council will consider their options to acquire a unit in Bear Hollow--in order to preserve it as Affordable Housing.
The council meets at the Coalville Courthouse and shortly before 4:00 pm, they will discuss the Right of First Refusal they have to acquire a unit on Oslo Lane.
County manager Tom Fisher explained the county had aimed to generate housing with deed restrictions.
"The Bear Hollow project and its different phases were part of that. Over the years we figured out that our deed restrictions probably are not accomplishing what we want them to accomplish. They have some loopholes in them that some owners have been allowed to do nightly rentals, or they're charging rents that are higher than what would be considered affordable. Within those deed restrictions is an ability for the county to have first right of refusal on purchasing those units. Which would allow us at this point to adjust those deed restrictions so that they stay affordable over the life-span of those projects."
Fisher said they might look at some other properties in Bear Hollow.
"We have to wait for them to come on the market, but there are some others. We know of two that might be coming up in the next six-months to a year. We want to not only provide a method that would work for this case, but we'd like to provide a method that also allows us to do this with more units over time."
The funding for the acquisition might be found in a couple of ways.
"One of the places that we could use is our in-lieu fees. We have some fund balance built up there, about $450,000. Also, we have the ability to enter into a relationship with Mountainlands Community Housing Trust who could do the financing around that with some minor dollars from the county in order to help buy down some of those costs to bring them back to their affordable status."
We asked Fisher what the staff is recommending.
"There's also the idea that we've talked about in the past of possibly just buying some of these outright in order to have units available for county staff workforce to have affordable units. I think that we'll be talking about all of those there may not be a decision made at this point. If I were recommending right now I would prefer to enter in to that relationship with Mountainlands Community Housing Trust; because I believe it will stretch our in-lieu fee fund balance as far as possible, so that we can effect more of these units in the future."
