49 foreclosures filed by land bank

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

The attorney for Trumbull County’s new land bank, Assistant Prosecutor Jeff Adler, has filed foreclosures on 49 properties so far and expects them to be ready for purchase by September.

Adler told the members of the Trumbull County Land Reutilization Corporation at its quarterly meeting Tuesday that the properties in question are throughout Trumbull County and have “been abandoned for years.”

He filed the foreclosures over the past 10 days.

Starting with abandoned, vacant properties will enable the land bank to begin to fulfill its primary goal — to eliminate blight — said Sam Lamancusa, Trumbull County treasurer.

In all 49 cases, property owners on adjacent properties have expressed a desire to purchase the property, and that means there’s a good chance the new owner will clean up the property and take better care of it, Lamancusa said.

In many cases, the neighboring land owner already has been maintaining it, he noted.

Lamancusa’s office has turned over 75 such parcels to Adler so far, and Adler will take the remaining steps to acquire them for the land bank throughout the second half of the year, Lamancusa said.

A 2009 Ohio law makes it possible for a county land bank to file foreclosure on a property on which delinquent taxes are owed and to acquire the property in about nine months. Foreclosures traditionally take two to three years, officials say.

By the end of the year, Trumbull’s land bank also will acquire properties that have homes on them and have not been blighted or abandoned for long periods of time, Lamancusa said.

Acquiring and re-selling those types of properties benefits the community by getting them back into productive use more quickly than through the traditional foreclosure process, officials have said.

“I’m impressed with the progress you’ve made so far,” said James Pirko, a Howland Township real-estate agent and secretary of the Mahoning Valley Real Estate Investors Association.

“You hit the ground running, and you are running,” Pirko said.

Lamancusa mentioned that one of the properties the land bank expects to impact is a former 300-unit apartment complex on Naylor-Lloyd Road in Liberty Township that has been abandoned for about eight years.

Lamancusa hopes to file foreclosure on that property by the end of the month and eventually bring the seven-acre property into the land bank so that it can be redeveloped.

But for a year or so after the property is acquired, Lamancusa believes the buildings could be used for firefighter training.

Firefighters could practice their skills there through demolition activities such as controlled burns, Lamancusa said.