A vacant house at 521 Wagner Road is one of three properties owned and recently declared to be surplus by the city of Centralia.
A vacant house at 521 Wagner Road is one of three properties owned and recently declared to be surplus by the city of Centralia.
Greg Towne and his family had been renting their home on Wagner Road for about seven years when their landlord, Pete Bezy, came by recently to explain the house was being sold and they would need to vacate the property.
Towne was floored, then worried about where his family would go. Would they become homeless?
Still trying to process the news, he picked up the phone and called the property owner: the city of Centralia.
“I got ahold of them and Kim (Ashmore) said ‘Hold on, we didn’t want you guys to have to move,’” Towne said. “(The city) just wants to sell the property. They said if I could get a loan, I could look at buying it from them.”
Ashmore, the public works director for Centralia, went to the Centralia City Council on Dec. 11 to ask them to approve a resolution declaring three city-owned properties to be surplus, thus authorizing city staff to sell them. The resolution passed without any discussion.
All three are located on Wagner Road, which is off Goodrich Road near the city’s wastewater treatment facility. One is an empty 4.85 acre lot valued at $65,300 by the Lewis County Assessor’s Office. Towne’s address, 315 Wagner Road, is valued at $232,300.
A second 5-acre lot is valued at $232,600 and is occupied by a manufactured home built in 1998. It hasn’t been occupied for awhile and needs a litany of repairs, including new flooring, before it is habitable.
“I’m not sure why it’s been vacant for at least the past couple of years,” Ashmore said. “We as a city never bothered to put money into it and get it back out on the market, so it sat there while we lost money. The question became whether we needed these properties when we can sell them and put money back into the wastewater fund for capital projects and things we need to do in that area.”
The city bought the properties when it acquired the land for the wastewater treatment plant in the mid-2000s. Records show it paid $395,000 in 2006 for the lot currently occupied by Towne and his family.
Towne said he reached out to the city two to three years ago about potentially buying the property outright. He says he was told it wasn’t for sale at the time, but that it could be available at a later date.
That time appears to be now. Ashmore said it appears that Towne will be able to qualify for a home loan. City staff will then sit down with Zuber to figure out a fair asking price and go from there.
Should the sale go through, it will lift a weight from Towne’s shoulders.
“We planned on staying here and raising our kids,” he said. “I don’t want to uproot and leave to go anywhere. We’ve looked for other places that could fit our needs and there aren’t any around here. It would be a huge relief to finally call it ours.”
