We will call this meeting to order.

This meeting is with the neighborhood preservation committee and the Greater Syracuse Land Bank.

I have with me Councillor Hogan, Councillor Gethers, Councillor Nave, and Councillor Codwell, myself, Congress Jones Rouser, and the land bank staff, Caitlin Wright, Luke Doherty's here, and a few others and MPD.

So we're going to start this meeting.

We just want to have a quick update on some of your budget items from this year.

And also give us an update on your future development proposals as well as the lease of the land that's being leased on to I-81.

Okay.

So that's just a start.

Okay.

Thank you for having us.

I appreciate the opportunity to share with all of you and with the public what it is that we're up to.

Every October, this is good timing, actually, because every October we adopt our budget for the four coming years.

And before we do that, we kind of true up our current year budget against what our year-end projections are.

So our budget for 2025 was initially drafted back in October of 24.

That was shortly after the city had adopted its new tax foreclosure law.

And so we were expecting the volume of foreclosures to increase significantly over the course of 2025, and we expected more sales.

We typically do between a million and a million and a half in sales each year.

And generally speaking, that covers about half of our operating costs.

So it costs about $2 million a year to keep the land bank running.

So that has a net zero effect on our budget.

And generally speaking, we raise about half of that through sales proceeds and a minimal amount through rent.

I'll talk about rent in a minute.

And we have a bit of a rainy day fund that we often have to dip into a small amount.

It was 18, and then it was a year, and now we're at nine months as we keep having a drawdown on that.

But so in our budget last year, when we thought the volume of foreclosures was going to be increasing, we figured that would mean we'd have more sales.

Um so that shows us running about 150,000 deficit, but that includes all of the financial support that we got from the city for 25 and 26.

We were able to book it all in this calendar year because our fiscal year is the calendar year and yours is off by six months.

Yeah.

Um so that would mean we won't be booking any income from the city for the first six months of 26.

We were able to roll that all forward into this year to help.

Um, and then we got 250,000 from the county this year.

So that's a million dollars of support from the city and the county.

And if it weren't for that, we'd be running a 1.1 million dollar deficit for the year, and we'd be out of business pretty quickly.

So that's our our budget situation right now, and I'm hoping that the volume of foreclosures will uh increase in the coming year, mostly so that we have more choices for buyers to look at.

Um there's a couple reasons for that.

So, one, we spend a lot of time working on site assembly.

Um, you'll see on that map over there uh we put together a lot of sites for new construction.

The pink ones are all sites where home headquarters either has built already or they're about to build.

Uh the blue ones are all under contract with Habitat for Humanity, and they have an application into the state for the state's block by block program.

At the very bottom of the map there, you'll see some in orange.

That's a joint effort between the Syracuse South Side Community Growth Foundation that Chetty is funding and REDAV CNY.

Um so they also have a block by block application in, and they're planning to build 10 single family homes.

Those will all be sold to owner occupants.

Um a whole bunch of these were are mostly for sale to owner occupants.

At the corner of Beard and Midland and Calvin and Midland, you'll see there's a very light green color.

Um that's all where Housing Visions has already put in new construction of two family homes.

And this is the process we go through where we start picking up almost a checkerboard of tax foreclosures, and we do demolitions and we do lot line adjustments to move the lines around to make them large enough to build on.

And unfortunately, that process is pretty slow, and so people in the community can't see that I'm moving lines around on a map, you know, you just don't see it in real life.

And uh it takes us years to do that site assembly and the demolitions that are needed to make them shovel ready sites.

Um over there where home headquarters had done a bunch of new builds on Woodland and Baker and Garfield.

Uh, in the eight years leading up to that, we spent a ton of money from grants on demolitions.

We went out and bought a um Freddie Mac foreclosure.

Um we got a couple of other properties donated to us by banks.

Um, and then we you know chip away at it putting together these building lots so that when they're ready to go apply to New York State for funding, they can say we have a signed contract with the land bank, we have the site control that we need for these lots, and that's critical to get that money back here to Syracuse.

Um when I say that we want to see more foreclosures, that's what we're looking at for vacant lots is making shovel ready sites for new construction.

Uh, and we're doing that with home headquarters and housing visions, but also with Jubilee homes.

Walt Dixie's here.

Um, a tiny home for good does the same thing, and I mentioned habitat and redev CNY.

So there's a lot of folks in town that look to us for those shovel ready sites so they can have a signed contract to bring that money home.

What are the purple sites?