Jefferson City council discusses next steps following blight study findings

The Jefferson City Council planned out its next steps to make noticeable changes to the rundown East Capitol Avenue area.

Tuesday night, the city council met to hear a presentation of the blight study findings on the crumbling historic area.

ABC 17 News reported last week, the study declared the area as a threat to public health and safety as well as an economic liability to the city.

The blight study showed the East Capitol Avenue area had decreased in value by more than three-quarters of a million dollars in eight years.

Business owners in the area told ABC 17 News they wanted the city to take action.

“We try to keep our building very nice, and we’ve seen buildings falling apart around us,” Steve Veile, the CEO of Communique Inc. said. “And so I come to work every day and I pass some of these places and every day it gets worse and worse.”

Tuesday, city council members moved to introduced an ordinance at the next city council meeting to declare the entire area “blighted.” Currently, only about 40 percent of the studied area is officially called blighted under city ordinance.

“We’re not sitting on this plan because it dates fairly quickly so we hope to move fairly quickly on this,” Second Ward Councilman Rick Mihalevich said.

The Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, or LCRA, will then be able to include the entire are in its urban renewal plan.

The LCRA will do an analysis of each property to determine which can be saved and which may have to be demolished.

Next, the city will do appraisals of the salvageable properties and negotiate with landowners to buy those properties. The city may now also use eminent domain as another tool to acquire the properties.

“It’s going to take dollars to solve the problem because you’ve got to purchase the land because it has value, and then you need to resell it or have it disposed of so it can be remodeled and/or rebuilt to standards,” Mihalevich said.

The cost to buy and resell the properties would fall on the LCRA as well as the city’s general revenue fund.

The upcoming year’s budget has a placeholder of about $595,000 to help pay for the costs, according to Mayor Carrie Tergin.

The city is also working to repave and replace gutters along Capitol Avenue with money from the half-cent capital improvement sales tax.

You can read more about the blight study’s findings here.