43
Crumbling dam sold for $50 at auditor’s auction
YOUNGSTOWN
A Youngstown man bought the crumbling Woodside Lake dam and part of that lake for $50 at a cash-only Mahoning County auditor’s auction Wednesday in the county courthouse.
The buyer, James I. Salter II, a general contractor with Salt of the Earth Construction Services, of McGuffey Road, declined to comment after the auction on his intentions for the 9.63-acre lake and dam property along South Meridian Road in Austintown.
Salter was the sole bidder for that property.
Nobody bid on the lake and dam property when county Auditor Ralph Meacham announced the opening bid was $8,720.
Meacham then started the bidding at $50.
The Austintown property was one of 20 real-estate parcels offered for sale in as-is condition to the highest bidder.
The parcels in Youngstown, Austintown, Campbell, Struthers and Smith Township had failed to sell in two sheriff’s sales.
Because they were delinquent in real-estate tax payments, they were forfeited to the state for Meacham to sell as the state’s agent.
Some of the parcels had buildings on them, and some did not.
Six properties got no bids, and several vacant lots sold for $50 each. Other properties sold for $500, $1,000 and $2,000.
The highest sale price was $10,743 for a 65-by-150-foot Illinois Avenue lot in Youngstown with a building on it.
The 34-minute auction drew 15 registered bidders.
“I think we were very successful. We cleared out a lot of the parcels,” Meacham said after the auction. “I’m very pleased and also pleased with the number of people coming out to bid,” he added.
“It takes a property that was probably derelict. ... Hopefully, a new owner will remediate that property, and just as importantly, it returns it to the tax base,” Meacham said of the value of having an auditor’s auction, even with relatively low total sales.
One waterfront homeowner at Woodside Lake, Tara Cioffi, attended the auction, but she did not bid on the dam property and said she did not know Salter.
“We’d like to see the lake stay in place. It’s been a good thing for Austintown Township. A lot of people that lived in Austintown for a long time know about the lake and have memories on the lake. Families have lived around the lake their whole lives and built their houses there, so we’d like to see it stay and [have the dam] be repaired. However we can get that done, we’re kind of working on it,” she said after the auction.
Cioffi said she’d be willing to contribute financially toward dam repair.
The Woodside Lake property had been on the list for a Nov. 30 auditor’s sale, but Meacham removed it from that sale to give lakefront homeowners more time to get dam repair cost estimates and decide if they wanted to buy the property and repair the dam.
“The dam and its spillway are in poor condition; and steps must be taken to repair the dam within the next year before conditions worsen,” Andrew D. Ware, the state’s acting water resources chief, warned Meacham’s office in a letter that followed the state’s April 19, 2016, safety inspection of the dam.
Meacham had said before the auction that if no buyer emerged, or the dam isn’t repaired, the lake likely would be drained and the dam breached.
That wouldn’t have boded well for about 30 lakefront homeowners, some of whose properties are worth $200,000 or more, George Berick, a lakefront homeowner, said at a homeowners meeting last fall.
Lakefront homes could lose half their value under the drain-and-breach scenario, said Berick, who owns Century 21 Lakeside Realty in Austintown.
Lakefront homeowners were not going to let that happen, no matter what it would take to fix the dam, Berick vowed at the Nov. 10 homeowners meeting he coordinated.
Berick proposed that one homeowner would buy the dam and part of the lake and that the lakefront homeowners would then share in the purchase and repair costs.
Dam repair estimates from contractors and other experts ranged from $80,000 to more than $100,000, but the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which is requiring the repairs, put the cost between $500,000 and $1 million, Berick said.
Most recently, water was leaving the lake by flowing over the dam spillway and through two plastic pipes that had been installed at the dam.