Cottage Grove waits on West Point Douglas Road project assessments

Talk about it

Cottage Grove City Council members voted to wait on assessing a handful of properties roughly $165,000 in the city’s far southern end in connection with a road project completed last year.

The City Council agreed to delay levying the assessments that pay for a portion of the $1.6 million project that reconstructed a stretch of West Point Douglas Road and extended the Highway 61 frontage road roughly 800 feet to a traffic signal-controlled intersection at Highway 61 and Manning Avenue.

The council will wait for the results of a formal benefit appraisal of a residential property along West Point Douglas Road that is challenging the $14,000 assessment against it for the roadwork completed last year before declaring the assessments on it and four neighboring commercial properties, including Erickson Marine.

City officials said they would revisit the issue in July.

A benefit appraisal is needed to gauge the financial benefit to properties affected by the road project. According to state statute, assessments cannot exceed the appraised benefit.

In the case of the West Point Douglas Road extension project, the city estimated a dollar benefit to the impacted properties based on appraisals done for other nearby parcels.

“I think we dropped the ball, frankly,” council member Justin Olsen said of the city’s decision not to conduct a formal benefit appraisal initially.

The project’s assessment process was already slowed last year by the state government shutdown. Minnesota Department of Transportation funding helped pay for the road improvements.

Tags: cottage grove, updates, news, government