This is why you never buy a house on land you don't own

Gdetrailer wrote:

valhalla360 wrote:
I think the bigger thing is the dollars involved.

$33million for the land...figure with improvements a total value of $50mil for one of the parks. Most businesses will want annual returns on the order of 15-20%, so it needs to generate around $7.5-10mil per year in addition to ongoing operating costs (staff, maintenance, utilities, etc...). Even for a big park, that's a lot of money to generate.

Sounds like the biggest issue for the city was how to get out of the landlord business without driving the campgrounds out of business. Didn't sound like there was any intent to stop leasing the land to the campgrounds until they could sort out a sales deal and the campgrounds benefitted from decades where they didn't have to come up with the money to buy the land outright, so no real harm there.

^^^This^^^

Campgrounds are currently leasing that land from the City of MB so they are paying for the land already but they do not own that land.. Keeping in mind that this is a very SMALL portion of these two campgrounds. Affects the southern part of Pirateland and the northern part of Lakewood.

In reality buying out city of MB of that land will increase the campgrounds value for land/property and would eventually get the campgrounds out of the land lease which is costing them for that lease.

I know there has been concern about the city of MB selling the property to outside developers which would most likely end up with bunches of additional condos which would most likely generate more income for the city of MB but at the demise of lower income from the campgrounds..

I would be shocked if the City wasn't required by law to maximize the proceeds in any sale. Usually this is accomplished by requiring sealed bids in any sale of publicly owned property. It is possible that the parks have the right of first refusal in such a sale, but I really can't see any way they could just negotiate a sales price without competitive bidding. A negotiated sale without bidding would be ripe for all sorts of fraud and malfeasance. Selling the land for $30 Million when it is worth $50 million would be ripping off the taxpayers, but might be very attractive to the City staffer whose uncle owned one of the parks or if there was a million dollars of unmarked bills suddenly left on the seat of his car. Obviously we don't have all the information, so it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.