North Carolina’s Elizabeth City Council’s finance committee has recommended rejecting the U.S. Coast Guard’s offer to purchase a parking lot, because the city claims it is worth more than twice what the Coast Guard is offering for it.
The panel voted to reject the Coast Guard's offer to buy the nearly 6-acre parking lot near the former DRS hangars for $861,120. City staff instead will work with Coast Guard officials to get a new appraisal of the site through the U.S. General Services Administration, The Daily Advance reported.
The 5.77-acre parking lot is part of 27 acres that the Coast Guard now leases from Elizabeth City. The city has an appraiser setting the property’s value at $1.9 million. The Coast Guard’s appraisal values the parking lot at less than half that amount.
The city and Coast Guard used different means to price the parking lot, City Manager Rich Olson told the finance committee. Olson said that the city hired an outside appraiser, Shackelford and Associates, to value the land, while the Coast Guard indirectly valued the property based on the value of two airport hangars that it bought from the previous property lease, DRS Technical Services.
“What we have decided to do is, is that we would agree on a scope of work for the appraisal and send the scope of work to the General Services Administration (GSA),” Olson said. “The GSA would hire the appropriate appraiser and within 120 days, we should have an offer based on what the appraisal is.”