City planning meeting for lake lot lease holders: City considering sale of properties to leaseholders

The Graham City Council Thursday approved city staff to invite all lake lot leaseholders to an informational meeting to discuss the idea of lake lot lease transfer and ownership. The discussion was brought up in previous council meetings by Graham City Manager Brandon Anderson to move forward with establishing a meeting and plan.

The informational meeting, which as of Thursday afternoon does not have a date or location set, according to Mayor Neal Blanton will be set up like a town hall meeting with a program set up by the city. Blanton said the meeting will get input from the leaseholders on what their feelings are on moving forward.

“I think that what we are doing is to try and get those people together and visit with them so that they understand where we are in this process and what might be going forward as far as the possibility of maybe selling those lots to those individuals out there. Similar to what they did at Possum Kingdom Lake,” Blanton said.

In the Oct. 15 council meeting Anderson said there are approximately 350 lake lot leaseholders and in the Oct. 1 council meeting spoke about how the city was looking into what is the best scenario for the lake lot leases.

“If you were on the council four years ago you remember we talked about possibly selling those lake lot leases at the time not as a money revenue generator, but it would generate some revenue, (but) mainly because of the confusion of having city-owned land out there and whether or not city ordinances apply and just kind of a lot of things that we were going through at the time,” Anderson said Oct. 1. “Now, with the appraisal values and the lake lot leases being longer than a year and the legality of them having to pay taxes on that land I think all of us, if we were in those lease lot holder’s shoes, would feel like we would want to own that land.”

For the rest of the story, see the Oct. 31 edition of The Graham Leader.