Monday’s Oak Hill City Council meeting included a special workshop to discuss possibilities for the long-vacant Collins Middle School property, which city officials regard as a nuisance property.
The school’s main building was shuttered in January 2015 due to unsafe conditions. Students in Grades 7-8 were relocated to various other school buildings in the county. Students in Grades 5-6 finished that school year on the Collins campus.
Portable buildings were set up on the Oak Hill School Campus to house the middle school students the following school year.
A new Oak Hill Middle School opened in August 2019 on the centralized school compound that also houses the Fayette Institute of Technology (FIT), New River primary and intermediate schools and Oak Hill High.
A bus center formerly located on the Collins property is now housed on the Oak Hill main campus, and the last instructional resource — an auto body class — has moved to FIT.
The school system maintains a security presence on the Collins property, according to Tim Payton, director of operations for the Fayette County Board of Education.
Oak Hill City Council recently enlisted the aid of attorney Michael Taylor to hire an appraiser for the property. Taylor, of the Pence Law Firm, is also working with other entities to determine current ownership of the property, which was originally transferred to the school system by the estate of pioneer coal operator Justus Collins around 1950 for the purpose of locating a high school there. Collins High School remained onsite until the mid-1970s when a new high school was built across town. That left the middle school students at the Collins property.
The city authorized Taylor to hire an appraiser for the property.
“The deed had a reversionary clause in it if the school was no longer used as a high school, it would revert back to Justus Collins (estate and heirs),” Taylor explained last week. “The school did stop operating as a high school, and it went from a high school to a middle school. Now, there’s no schooling going on there.”
“There is an issue (involving the reversionary clause) and who actually owns the property,” he added. “It depends on your position on what you take regarding the reversionary clause.
“Ultimately, I don’t know, a court may have to resolve who owns it. But, from the city’s perspective, we don’t care who owns it. It’s a nuisance right now, and there’s a statute that we can work under that permits us to seek demolition costs and other costs from the owner or responsible parties. It’s broader than ownership.
“The board of education, to their credit, did conduct a title examination, and they did share that with the city. There are some issues with the title, but essentially it’s our understanding that — if the property would revert back or if it already has reverted back — the ownership would fall to the Venable Trust (50 percent) and Virginia Military Institute (50 percent).
“The city has retained me to engage in conversations with all affected parties. We’re looking for a solution to this property, because right now it appears that this property is in substantial disrepair, would cost a substantial amount of money to repair and put back to productive use.” The aim, he said, is to get it “where we can clear up legal title, get the property into somebody’s hands — whether it’s a government agency or somebody else’s hands — that can get money to develop and fix the property and put it back for marketable use.”
“The board of education acknowledges that the property previously used for Collins Middle School has reverted by the original deed, and it appears to have reverted to Virginia Military Institute and the Venable Trust,” said Fayette County Superintendent Gary Hough. “This means that the board does not own the property.
“We are aware of the city’s interest in the property and aware that the city has had discussions with these two entities. The board is committed to assisting our partners at the city in any way that we can.”
At Monday’s council meeting, Taylor discussed establishing a Land Reuse Agency (LRA) with Oak Hill representatives. He was involved in helping the Fayette County Commission get its LRA up and running last year.
“Personally, I’m very pro government agencies having a land reuse agency because governments are subject to all kinds of statutes regarding the acquisition and disposition of property,” he said. “Generally, if a government agency has a piece of real property, they have to then auction it off. Auctioning it off isn’t necessarily the best option. It’s clunky, and it can cause a lot of problems that governments don’t want to get involved.”
“The legislature created LRAs,” he continued. “The purpose is to allow governments to obtain and dispose of property in an easier manner than, say, just another government agency. It’s a land banking-type statute. One of the options for the Collins school is that, if none of the entities want the property, they could — in theory — deed it over to the government. Or, if the city creates a land reuse agency, the land reuse agency would then have the ability, since they’re a government agency, to obtain government funds to help clean up the property, then dispose of it faster than putting it at an auction.”
Another good use for LRAs includes working with dilapidated structures, he noted.
“LRAs are not designed for government to hold properties; they’re designed for governments to obtain properties that are problematic for whatever reason and get them hopefully into a non-problematic state.”
The county LRA can’t operate in any jurisdiction that already has an LRA, Taylor said, but the county’s LRA is the only one operating in Fayette at this time. “Ideally, in a perfect world in government cooperation, the statute does permit those entities to enter into an inter-cooperation agreement and they can work together.”
Once created, the responsibility for funding an LRA falls to a county or municipality or agency, Taylor said. There are some general grants possible, but the state has committed no LRA-specific funding to provide a base of support, he noted.
The next regular meeting of the council is April 14. The laying of the levy will occur on April 15.
