My submittal...

I now will share with you the document I sent to the Miner last Sunday.

I'm not sure I care if it is run in the paper or not any longer. It was written before Monday's City Council meeting and things have changed since then.

What has changed?? Well as you will see I called for Council to reverse their decision on the major amendment. No motion was made at the meeting to do so and later they set in motion, officially, to face referendum.

Also what has changed is that a particular community group already responded to my idea of sitting down to form a collaborative positive solution to the problems that face Kingman, and is not interested in negotiating. Loyalty to 1,190 signatures is all that matters it seems. Maybe some of these folks are running for office next year after all.

I'm not going to put what I wrote in block quotes and it follows this....

By Todd Tarson of MOCO Real Estate News

I offer the following as a concerned citizen of Kingman only. My views and opinions are not necessarily those of other Realtors that belong to the local Association that I’ve had the pleasure of representing as a leader over the last four plus years.

I have been a staunch supporter of finding a solution that allows the construction of a new traffic interchange near the Kingman Crossing area along Interstate 40.

When I first heard about the major amendment to the Kingman General Plan to change the land use designation of the city owned lands, I was in total support. So much so that I helped rally the Members of the Kingman/Golden Valley Association of REALTORS to ask the Kingman city leaders to approve the major amendment. I testified to this fact at the Kingman Planning & Zoning Commission on April 24th and contacted City Council members and the Mayor either in person, by phone, and email.

The Members of KGVAR responded on May 7th at the City Council meeting, over 100 Members were in attendance and many appealed to the Council to approve the decision. I’m still very proud of the efforts that were undertaken by all who contributed.

Initially approving the general plan amendment helps condition the city owned lands for highest and best use. My mind has not changed on that fact. However, in recent times I have changed my mind on the current progress of things attributed to the possible traffic interchange and the management of the city owned lands.

So I am asking the Council to reverse their decision to approve the major amendment to the general plan that was decided on back at May 7th’s City Council meeting.

Today the city faces a referendum on this issue. In fact the honorable Mayor Byram is facing at least his third referendum and is most likely to lose on this one like he has the last two that I am aware of. Referendums do not bode well for the city’s reputation and I’ve heard various media sources talking about this one around the state. We’ve heard from an interested buyer of 640 acres of State Trust land that he has backed off because of the political climate Kingman is experiencing today. The negative effects of this referendum are not needed at this time.

The liability of revelations of recent city staff undertakings is making the whole process too risky at the moment. I’m speaking of some findings in the infamous emails that Travin Pennington has been after for months now.

On the Kingman Daily Miner’s website there is an article posted with the date of February 26th of this year. It is a question and answer interview with the current city manager and includes the following quote attributed to him regarding the city owned lands…

“So it's exciting, and to me, it gives us, because we control it, it gives us a lot of opportunities to get the community involved and do the right thing. And that's really what the Council, the previous Council and this Council, wanted to do, is maximize our piece of the puzzle to the benefit of the community regardless of how it turns out.”

Yet on the VERY same day the article is posted he dispatches the following email…

“I was out on my quad yesterday and saw a truck leaving our property with an empty flatbed; upon further investigation I noticed that whoever it was had dumped a lot of trash at the sight, that, along with the car chassis, several tires, a broken doll house and too many Wal Mart plastic bags to count must surely qualify our property as blighted.”

It is hardly exciting to me as a property owner, an agent for property owners, and someone who will always stand for the rights of property owners to have a government official getting ‘excited’ about blighting property… especially since, as a resident, it is my property he is excited about blighting.

The city manager is supposed to be a good steward of the city and my first reaction when reading his email was he just witnessed a crime against the citizens of Kingman. Did he call the police and give a vehicle description? Did he use his quad to chase down the flatbed truck to get the license plate to report?

Instead I get the feeling that only the excitement of potentially blighting the residents of Kingman’s best asset was on his mind at the time. For shame if I am right.

Recently the City Council decided to keep the current city manager in his position. Fine. Maybe they can consider ending their relationship with S&Y Capital Group. It is no secret that S&Y has been hired to sell the property the city owns at some point for 14% of the sale plus repayment of other costs associated to the project that they have incurred so far. At that rate I have to question the motivation for a firm that has no development experience, no end users and, based on the e-mails, are trying to supplant the legal processes under State Statute and the City’s own Ordinances by declaring the City property at Kingman Crossing as “re-development land or blighted land” so that no vote of the people is required to sell this land and by scheming to sell this land to a “private entity for a nominal sum”.

You see if the city was to market the property themselves, with the help of extremely talented people in the real estate business that already live right here in Kingman, and offered a buyer-broker fee of 2.5% to whoever represents a possible buyer and somehow managed to sell the property for $20 million dollars, the cost would be $500,000 of the proceeds of sale.

At 14% S&Y would only have to sell Kingman’s best asset for just a little over $3.5 million dollars to receive the same commission. Why are we in a position to either leave millions of dollars on the table or pay exorbitant costs out of the proceeds of any potential sale?

The city has a legal team and I’m sure could handle a transfer of property agreement and thereby wouldn’t have to pay anyone to represent them, not a local Realtor and certainly not an outside consulting firm with a high price tag. Why part with so much potential money that is needed for future projects such as another traffic interchange?

I am currently engaging other community leaders in an effort to put aside our own differences and work together to form a consensus that everyone could support. The community groups I am hoping to attract to this panel would be from the Business, Builders, Landowners, and Realtors groups and would of course also include RAID and the developer on the north side of the Interstate across from the city lands (Vestar).

I ask that the issues of traffic interchanges, city owned land sales, land use designations, and others be put on hold at City Hall to allow for a unified proposal to come from the community. A proposal by consensus that will be supported by the residents, one that we will all be proud of and enjoy the benefits from for the future of Kingman.

I ask the current city leaders to please consider reversing the Council’s decision on the major amendment to the General Plan to put an end to the need of the controversial referendum issue on the November ballot. The community can come together on this most important issue and provide the solution.

I have so much faith in this effort that city leaders will be begging the same group for a solution to other important issues like expansion by annexation.

Update:

I've come to find out that when I attempted to email the Daily Miner what I've written above, the emails were not received. I've had some weird email issues lately so this does not surprise me. After I had initially sent the email to the editor I called and left him a message to be looking for what I had written. When I talked to him today... he was still waiting.

Like I said, now that what I have written is nearly a week old and some things have changed I'm not expecting them to publish this. However, I have given them something else to chew on that speaks to what is written above. More on this next week.