Often worthless
Some land even Shelby County won’t take
As the owner of last resort for unpurchased tax sale properties, Shelby County nearly always buys up unwanted real estate and moves it into the county land bank.
Then, there are those properties even the county doesn’t want.
“We have some properties that are nonconforming properties and those that you can’t build on,” said Tom Needham, county public works director. “They don’t have any value to them.”
Some are narrow lots where a shotgun house once stood, but which fail to meet current building codes. Some are drainage ditches and detention basins put in decades ago.
A lot on Pillow Street had two nonconforming buildings. The county also passed on a small landlocked property that had a transmission tower on it.
Many are properties with environmental risks, including service stations, lots with underground storage tanks, mortuaries, buildings that housed exterminators or other businesses that used toxic chemicals.
“Anywhere that’s got ‘tox’ in it, I’m not real wild about,” said Carter Gray, assistant county attorney.
A state law passed about six years ago allows the County Commission through resolution to order the Chancery Court not to buy these properties. If the county can’t sell it out of the land bank, then the county doesn’t want to own it.
The largest of these properties is the site of the former Piper Farm Products Inc. on West U.S. 72 in Collierville.
It’s a spot now best known as the Smalley-Piper Superfund site. In the 1970s, magnesium battery casings were cleaned and treated at the site.
“It’s got $25 million in federal liens against it,” Gray said.
If the county had bought the Smalley-Piper site, it would not have been responsible for the $25 million lien.
But federal and state liens cannot be waived, Needham said, so anyone who bought the property out of the Land Bank would have had to pay that lien.
Even in Collierville, where real estate doesn’t come cheap, $25 million is a pretty steep price tag.
“It’s a dead property, for all intents and purposes,” said James Lewellen, Collierville town administrator. “It’s in a good location and it could have been a tax-generating, productive site and now it never will be again.”
Luckily, at about two or three acres, it’s a smaller property and the contamination hasn’t spread, Lewellen said.
“It could have caused a bigger problem. It could have been a bigger threat than it is,” he said.
Still, nothing keeps the county’s rejected properties from being bought by someone else, Gray said.