Staff to create policy for donation of city’s ‘surplus land’
The Cape Coral City Council began moving forward with a policy for the donation of city-owned “surplus land” to charitable organizations on Wednesday.
Amy Yearsly, with the city’s Development Services Department, discussed the draft policy for qualified organizations. The identification procedure is pretty much the same — a dry lot, within the right size, land use, zoning and wildlife concerns, she said.
“Those are the things it formally adopts. It puts together a scoring matrix for staff to use while identifying the properties,” she said at the council workshop. “Typically, we are reactive. This puts a process where we are proactive. We have these properties — here is what we are looking for, come in, we will score you and bring forth a recommendation of donations to the City Council.”
City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn said staff was told to create a policy of how to go about donating land to nonprofit organizations. He said it starts off with a legislative determination of whether or not to have items on the list, identify good housing units, rank them and determine how to reward the property.
“There are multiple points along the way that council has the opportunity to declare whether or not to make property available for housing,” Ilczyszyn said. “Rather than it being an ad hoc process at the whim of someone in the private sector, it’s a very linear process starting with the policy setting, administrative analysis, legislative to add or not, administrative ranking and back to legislative reward.”
Councilmember Bill Steinke said he is not in favor of putting a menu out of the property available.
The purpose, Councilmember Jennifer Nelson-Lastra said, was not to solicit the property, but rather address partners they do not normally work with.
The council agreed to remove a sentence out of the proposal, which addresses the list being adopted by resolution by the City Council and published on the city’s website.
Mayor John Gunter said providing the donation to an organization should be a fair and equitable approach no matter the organization coming forth.
“We want a process in place when someone comes to us — not us going out to the community,” he said.
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