City to cash in on BLM land deal at Silver Springs Ranch

A willingness to help a fellow government agency, and great timing, is about to pay off for Carson City. In fact, it's about to pay off $1.5 million.

Four years ago, Carson City leaders agreed to buy 62 acres near the Silver Springs Ranch west of Carson River Road on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for $1 million. Now the bureau will likely buy it back for two and a half times that.

"We don't buy land to speculate," said Carson City's open space manager Juan Guzman. "Once we have land we try not to sell it, but this was something that was worked out in advance."

The BLM wanted the property to fill in the boundaries of the Prison Hill Recreation Area but feared it would be filled with homes by the time the federal government agreed to spend the money on it. Then-owner Al Bernhard was already looking to develop part of the parcel.

"It would have been a reduction of a pretty decent piece of open space that both the city and the BLM would have wished they'd kept in open space," said bureau spokesperson Mark Struble.

The Prison Hill area wouldn't be nearly as popular with recreators "if you stop and think about what it would look like if there were 300 homes there," he said.

Skeptical at first, the city eventually agreed to buy the land before Bernhard started to develop it.

"It was not an easy sale," said Guzman. "It took quite a bit of consideration to decide to buy it."

As far as the economics of the deal go, it looks like the city made the right choice. The BLM offered to pay the assessed price for the land earlier this month,and on Monday the city's open space committee will recommend to the full board of supervisors to move forward with the sale.

Carson City started the paper work to sell the property to the BLM in 2003, when U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton rubber-stamped the purchase. An assessment of the parcel then found it had ballooned in value by $300,000 to $1.3 million - a nice profit after just three years, but not nearly as much as the next two years would bring.

The real explosion in Carson City property prices, depending on the property's location, happened in the last two years. An appraisal early this year pegged the land's value at $2.5 million, 250 percent of what the city paid in 2001.

City Manager Linda Ritter said the money from the sale will go into Carson City's open space budget, where the funds to buy the land originally came from. Guzman said he has a long wish list of projects that need funding, although some will already be at least partially paid for by grants through Nevada's Question 1 open space program.

The happy ending, for Carson City, to the once-shaky deal demonstrates, Guzman said, "that even if we have to wait, what we land managers work out really works."

n Contact reporter Cory McConnell at cmcconnell@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1217.

If You Go

What: Carson City Open Space Advisory Committee meeting

When: 6 p.m. on Monday, April 18

Where: Sierra Room of the Carson City Community Center, 851 E. William St.