City Commissioners take legal action to tear down the Heritage House
The Heritage House is Albany’s biggest eye sore and city commissioners decided to move forward with an abatement procedure to tear it down.
Commissioner Bob Langstaff says the commissioners want the property owner to bring the Heritage House up to code or tear it down. The cost to demolish the structure would cost between $800,000 and $1.6 million dollars. The commission recognizes the city may wind up paying for it if the owner won’t. “If the property owner does it themselves it could happen soon, if not it would be at least 270 days if the city were going to do it” says Langstaff.
Commissioners also approved a new housing development loan program to encourage community and economic development. The loan would provide a $25,000 incentive to developers and commissioners added in precautionary measures.
Commissioner Roger Marietta says they’ve been burned before so they are taking steps to make sure that doesn’t happen again. “We added a criminal background check to the applicants and we also changed the wording so that the developer wouldn’t get paid $25,000 until the property actually closed on” says Marietta.
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