BEATRICE – The City of Beatrice is hiring a company to conduct a blight study of the area where three old elementary school buildings are located.
That could help pave the way for using tax increment financing to redevelop those areas when the buildings are taken down. This coming fall, a new prekindergarten to fifth grade school facility in east Beatrice will replace the buildings.


City Administrator Tobias Tempelmeyer spoke about the council-approved hiring of Hanna-Keelan Associates for the Stoddard, Paddock Lane and Lincoln Elementary school sites. "One of the large economic development tools that we have is TIF. It's only available in a blight and substandard area. The first step is to have a study done. Hanna Keelan usually does our studies for us. The study is $8,500....and Hanna Keelan says they'll have it done for us, late March or early April."


The former Cedar School….now a preschool….was already located in an area determined as blighted. Tempelmeyer says the old school buildings currently meet a state law definition of blight, in one respect.


"The designation as blight and substandard is not our terminology. That's what the state legislature has deemed that we have to use. It has nothing to do with how good or bad properties actually are. There's about eight to ten criteria in there that are listed by state statute. That's what Hanna Keelan will go out, and survey. One of them is that any building that is forty years or older is deemed to be blighted an substandard. If you start looking at the elementary schools....all of them were built in the 1950s....they will qualify."


The city is bumping up against it’s allowable limit of 35-percent of the community being in a blight and substandard area. Tempelmeyer says about 30 acres of area has been identified that could be removed from a blighted designation….to keep the city within that limit.  That would be similar to what was done several years ago, when the city removed the municipal airport as being in a blight zone.


Also Monday night....The City of Beatrice has a newly amended ordinance dealing with junked or inoperable vehicles. The city council has given final approval to the ordinance that increases the fines for violators…..to $250 for a first-offense, $375 for a second violation and $500 for subsequent violations. Despite the increased penalties, city officials say they will still try to work with owners of problem junked vehicles to solve the situation, without fines or court action….as has been practice in the past.


There was virtually no public comment on the change in the past few weeks, during separate rounds of consideration by the council.