Chautauqua County Land Bank Executive Director Gina Paradis said land banks were created by New York State in 2012 as a way to deal with vacant and abandoned properties following the 2008 mortgage crisis, “And they saw the success that other states were having with land banks, primarily in Michigan and Ohio. And so they worked with some people to really understand land banking and how those tools could work and decided to put together the legislation to create the authority for land banks to be created in taxing jurisdictions throughout the state.”

Over the last decade, land banks in the state have

– Acquired over 5,000 problem properties
– Demolished 1,567 vacant structures
– Returned 3,231 properties to productive use
– Generated more than $300 million in private investment
– And returned $135 million in assessed value to local tax rolls

Paradis said of those figures, the Chautauqua County Land Bank has acquired 362 properties, demolished 172 structures, and returned $8.5 million to the tax rolls.

She said the pandemic hurt the land bank’s ability to acquire properties, as the county’s tax auction was on hiatus from January 2020 until July 2022, “We really went a couple of years with no inventory to sell and still plenty of demos to do. But we ended up in that real tough situation where we had little inventory to create revenue and our grand funding was twilighting and we were looking at a gap in funding for that period.”

Paradis said funding assistance by the Sheldon Foundation as well as revenues from previous years helped bridge the gap. She said mortgage crisis settlement monies initially funded land banks in the state, but that funding has been totally expended. Paradis said the proposed state budget includes a line item for Land Banks that she’s hopeful will get passed.

In November 2022, Jamestown City Council approved allocating $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to the Chautauqua County Land Bank. Paradis said that contract is still in the review process.

Chautauqua County

County Director of Real Property Services Kim Meleen said the tax auction took place online from July 9 through 22, “We hadn’t done an auction in three years due to COVID, so there really wasn’t a place big enough to hold an in-person, or a time frame long enough to probably hold an in-person auction with the amount of properties we had.”

Meleen said there were initially 800 properties on the auction list with 400 properties going to auction. She said most of those 400 properties were sold, which is substantially more than past tax auctions. She said total financials from the auction aren’t available yet as people are still coming in to make payments.

Meleen added that the auction helps the County recoup back taxes owed, “The county guarantees taxes to all the municipalities, so they all make their tax levy amounts in their budgeted amounts. So the county takes the brunt of that, so I think this auction was very successful in helping the county recoup some of that money.”

Meleen said she hopes to continue to hold future tax auctions online as well.