LIHTC developer seeks site control of district-owned land
- Published: January 8, 2025
Village Council members began their first meeting of the year not together, but apart — physically, at least.
Winter Storm Blair dressed Yellow Springs — along with much of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic — in nine inches of snow, and forced Village Council to go remote. Despite the wintery conditions, the group carried out business as usual and returned to a familiar topic: the low-income housing tax credit, or LIHTC, project.
Last month, Village Council agreed to authorize Village Manager Johnnie Burns to enter into a development agreement with Columbus-based Woda Cooper Development, Inc. to apply to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, or OHFA, for $15 million in federal LIHTC money — an amount that would allow Woda Cooper to build an affordable housing development comprising 30 to 50 one-, two- and three-bedroom units.
As the News has reported over the last year, the location of such a development would be on 3.6 acres of land adjacent to the McKinney Middle and Yellow Springs High schools — land that is currently owned by the school district. Locally, that acreage is known as the Morgan Fields and is currently home to several of local soccer programs.
Since last summer, a number of pivotal, intergovernmental steps were taken to prime the soccer fields for potential construction, should Woda Cooper be awarded the $15 million in tax credits. Those steps included subdividing the 3.6 acres from the rest of the district-owned property and rezoning the land to high-density residential, as well as ridding the land of some of its financial encumbrances.
As was discussed at Monday’s Council meeting, one matter still stands in the way of Woda Cooper applying for the subsidies: getting site control of the land from the school district.
According to Manager Burns, representatives from Woda Cooper recently reached out to him to let him and other local stakeholders know that OHFA would “kick out” any application for a LIHTC project on land that’s not municipally controlled or owned by the developer.
“If [OHFA] doesn’t see site control, then an application would be quickly rejected,” Burns told Council members. “And the application is between $40,000 and $50,000. Submitting something that you know would get rejected wouldn’t be a wise decision on anyone’s part.”
The Morgan Fields haven’t yet been purchased by the Village — a cost totaling $339,000 per an earlier land appraisal — because in July of last year, the school board unanimously passed a resolution that the transfer of the land could occur only if stakeholders can successfully identify and secure a suitable property onto which the existing soccer programs can relocate.
According to Woda Cooper’s correspondence with Village staff, that formal resolution may have to be amended or removed in order for them to successfully advance in the LIHTC application process with OHFA. The final day to apply is Feb. 27.
As of press time, the school board was expected to weigh in on the matter of returning to that resolution’s language at the group’s Thursday, Jan. 9, regular meeting — a meeting that the News is unable to cover prior to the deadline of this week’s issue.
In public meetings, school board members, Village Council members and Village staffers have raised the possibility of a forthcoming land donation from a neighboring resident to McKinney Middle and Yellow Springs High schools — a donation that would fulfill the contingency in the school board’s resolution.
In a Jan. 7 letter to the school board ahead the group’s Thursday meeting, Matthew and Julie Jones, who own an 84-acre farm to the south of the schools, stated publicly that they are in the “final review stage” of soon donating a commensurate amount of their land to the school district. The Joneses wrote that they “expect a donation agreement to be completed next week.”
As Burns told Council members on Monday, he and Village Solicitor Amy Blankenship are actively in conversations with the Joneses and their attorneys.
Should the district sell the existing 3.6-acre soccer fields to the Village, the district would have that money to improve the Joneses’ donated farmland to create new athletic fields.
Burns later noted that Fillmore Construction LLC quoted the Village “an estimate of $475,000,” and he acknowledged that the price of turning a cornfield into a soccer field “could be more, could be less” than that estimate.
Council member Gavin DeVore Leonard addressed this possible discrepancy between the sale price of the Morgan Fields and the costs associated with improving the Joneses’ cornfield for eventual athletic fields.
“With the ultimate goal of getting more affordable housing in the village and this being a huge potential return on our investment … I would be supportive of the Village trying to help close the gap — if one exists,” DeVore Leonard said.
In addressing recent concerns expressed on local social media groups and letters to the editor — particularly those that have suggested the school board amending its contingency resolution would jeoparize securing replacement fields — Council President Kevin Stokes said that such an amendment is strictly in the interest of giving Woda Cooper “full access” to the land where they intend to “go digging holes and building buildings.”
“It’s that simple,” the Council president said. “The Village isn’t saying to the schools, ‘You need to remove this requirement [of finding replacement land].’ It’s the builder [Woda Cooper] saying that a good application means them having full control of the land, not contingent on things they have no control over.”
Stokes continued: “OHFA expects its applicants to have access to the land or to own it outright. That is a fact. And Woda [Cooper] said they are not submitting an application if they don’t have full control of the land.”
DeVore Leonard echoed Stokes and reaffirmed his and Council’s commitment to seek a solution — one that leads to a successfully realized LIHTC project, as well as securing replacement athletic fields.
“There is no one who has advocated for the removal of this contingency without first addressing the soccer fields,” DeVore Leonard said. “Everyone’s trying to figure this out.”
“That’s right,” Stokes said. “There is a great deal of interest and passion around this, but it’s a fact that too much external influence has jeopardized some portion of this project at various points. … There is nothing nefarious happening here.”
Burns said the same: “There are a lot of moving pieces to this big puzzle. We’re not trying to take out the school board’s resolution as a ‘We got you!’ We’re just trying to move the project forward and work with a landowner at the same time.”
The News will continue reporting on LIHTC-related developments, and, in the next issue of the News, an article will cover the outcome of the school board’s determination on whether to amend its resolution to necessarily secure replacement land for soccer fields before selling the Morgan Fields to the Village.
In other Council business, Monday, Jan. 6—
•Village Council unanimously agreed to authorize wage increases for Village Manager Burns and Village Clerk Judy Kintner by 3.5% beginning this year.
• Burns noted that the effects of this week’s snowstorm exceeded the capabilities of the snow-deterring brine that crews spread on local roads in the preceding weeks. Burns said that the Village switched to dispersing salt — starting with 300 tons, and receiving 200 more tons on Tuesday, Jan. 7. According to Burns, clearing this amount of snow from village roads necessitates approximately 60 tons of salt per day.
• Council agreed to contribute $1,000 to The 365 Project for the group’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day activities in Yellow Springs. That money will assist in technical support for livestreaming the event, as well as to assist in the funding of Dr. Ron Wyatt — a relative of Coretta Scott King — who will speak at the community event on Monday, Jan. 20.
Because of that Monday’s holiday, the next Village Council meeting will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 21.
• Council gave first reading to several ordinances pertaining to the proposed repealing of the Gateway Overlay District. Created in 2013, when the Village last overhauled the zoning code, the Gateway Overlay District previously aimed to establish regulations and limitations on what could be built — and, notably, how high — within three areas on the fringes of municipal boundaries.
Should the Gateway Overlay District be stricken from the code, new buildings or development within these three areas would be subject to the existing zoning regulations.
Council will give second readings — as well as hold public hearings — on these ordinances at its next meeting. The News will report further on the matter in an upcoming issue.
Click here to read more about the background of the Gateway Overlay District when Planning Commission unanimously recommended last month to Council to repeal the Gateway Overlay District.
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