City to foreclose on gas station, clean up tires

The City Council voted to take ownership of an abandoned Main Street gas station to follow through on plans to clean up hundreds of tires on the property with a grant the city received earlier this year.

The city qualified for a $41,000 grant from the Nortex Regional Planning Commission in April to remove about 10 trailers full of passenger and commercial vehicle tires from 301 E. Main St. beside the First Baptist Church of Olney. The city also said it would invite residents with tires stacked on their properties to dispose of them at the same time.

But the plan hit a snag when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality refused to fund the grant after learning that the tires sit on a privately owned site. The owners of the abandoned property owe about $40,000 in back taxes, and the city considered foreclosing on the property and taking possession of it. However, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations require that the underground gasoline tanks on the site be removed before the property could be sold, possibly saddling the city with the gas station “indefinitely,” City Administrator Arpegea Pagsuberon said.

Adding to the urgency, Nortex indicated that the city would lose the grant unless it used it soon, Mrs. Pagsuberon told the Council at its Dec. 12 meeting.

“They are pushing,” she said. “If I don’t give them an answer we are going to lose it.”

City Attorney Dan Branum and Mrs. Pagsuberon liaised with federal regulators and determined the city is “not responsible for the tanks in the ground and … because it is going into tax foreclosure we would not be responsible for the environmental issues for the tanks or the tires or anything like that,” Mrs. Pagsuberon said. “Getting ownership - that’s how we are going to clean up those tires.”

The property, owned by Rosana Cruz Corwin and Mark Brandon Corwin of Graham, is set to be foreclosed upon next month, she said. After the city takes possession of the property, Mrs. Pagsuberon said she will pursue another grant to remove the tanks.

“If we don’t get a grant to take the tanks out we could get stuck with the property,” she said.

Mayor Rue Rogers remarked that the city could bulldoze the building and create a parking lot.

Assistant City Attorney Dan Branum said he believed there were “parties interested in it.”

The council voted unanimously to allow the property to go into tax foreclosure. “This is a good step forward to … kick that off and utilize that money and get those tires cleaned up,” Mayor Rogers said.