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Another land sale falls apart for Detroit (complete article from source)
Source: The Detroit News, by Christine MacDonald and Candice Williams
January 09, 2007
Howell Public Schools has backed out of a $936,000 offer to Detroit for 36 acres of Camp Brighton in Genoa Township.
It's the second suburban land sale to go sour for Detroit in weeks. Last month, developers retracted an $11.25 million offer for Detroit's Rackham Golf Course in Huntington Woods.
School officials, who'd wanted the land for expansion, determined that too much of the 36 acres was swampy.
"We figured that we'd have 17 acres of that land that aren't useable," said Rick Terres, associate superintendent of business for Howell Public Schools. "We'd still be paying top price for the whole piece. It doesn't make sense to put out dollars for a (36-acre) piece of land and some of it is unusable."
The district sent a letter to the city backing out of the deal Dec. 18.
A separate, $3.5 million offer from the Chaldean Catholic Church for the other 160 acres of Camp Brighton -- its official name is the Detroit Recreational Camp -- still stands, said Detroit's Planning and Development Director Douglass Diggs. The church group plans to keep the land a camp.
The camp, with a 40-acre lake in the northeast corner of Genoa, has been a destination for city kids since Detroit bought it in the mid-1920s.
But it's been mostly closed in recent years, even with the city spending $5 million on renovations between 1997 and 2002. In 2006, it was reopened for rentals, such as graduation parties and family reunions.
The Detroit City Council has to approve any land sale and several council members, including Kwame Kenyatta and JoAnn Watson, have vowed to fight it. They argue the land is one of the city's jewels that shouldn't be sold.
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's staff has said the city needs to sell the property as part of a strategy to unload surplus land to reduce maintenance costs and bolster the sagging budget. And Detroit based its budget on selling $30 million worth of property this year.
"Obviously we are concerned but we feel these are both parcels we can continue to market," Diggs said of the Camp Brighton piece and Rackham Golf Course.
Click here for complete article from The Detroit News
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