District 21 to sell 70 acres

It will have to be appraised and the district will have to decide which 30 acres it will keep. It will also have to put out proposals to find a real estate agent to market and sell it.

He estimated it will be September or October before the district can make a move on that, he said.

“I think the important thing is the district is now willing to divest themselves in a planned manner of what is deemed to be excess property. The timeline gets a little less important,” he said.

“It’s highly unusual to own 100 acres inside the city limits,” he said.

Anderson said the 70 surplussed acres do not fall under the restrictive rules of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

“It’s developable because it’s not in the scenic area,” he said.

Proceeds from land sales would be used to help construct or equip a new school, he said.

The D21 board will ask voters in November to approve a $235 million bonding authority to replace the high school and three elementary schools. The money would be repaid over 50 years.

Board Chair Kathy Ursprung said the district acquired the property in a trade or exchange for the old Stadelman property, a 20-acre site that now houses Mid-Columbia Fire & Rescue and other properties between West Eighth and West 10th Streets.

The old Stadelman property was too small to build a school, she said, so the former District 12 pursued the land deal to get the much larger property in Columbia View Heights. The property was acquired in 1998.

She said of the 100 acres, “We’ve looked at various ways to develop it, and we’ve tried to engage with developers in the past.”

While strategies have been developed for development of the property, access has been an issue.

A lot of the Columbia View Heights property, which abuts, in part, the Oregon Veterans’ Home, “isn’t suitable for school development,” Ursprung said. “It is potentially suitable for residential development, and it’s a big chunk of potential residential land. We feel it’s important to make that property potentially available, that’s why we surplussed it and the proceeds of that sale would go toward some aspect of replacing schools in the district.”

She said, “It won’t go far but it might help furnish a building or something like that.”

The district is trying to address access issues with the Oregon Department of Transportation right now, she said, because the district still wants to use it as a school.

Access concerns have focused on the intersection of Hwy 197 and Columbia View Drive, the only access point to the area.

Randy said while the fair market value of the property is unknown right now, “there’s also the other consideration: when you take completely undeveloped tract of land there’s a fair amount of cost to get services extended” such as streets, water and sewer.