Carson City tells Autumn Village owners to pay up

Owners of the city's low-income senior apartments need to pay thousands of dollars in property taxes they opted out of without telling the city, the Carson City Board of Supervisors said Thursday.

The district attorney's office will send a notice of default to The Seasons Limited Partnership, which runs the two Autumn Village complexes east of the Carson City Senior Citizens Center on Beverly Drive.

The city will "exercise any and all rights and remedies" if the nonprofit doesn't start to pay within 60 days, "including but not limited to, repossession of the leased property," the letter says.

But Fred Cornforth, head of Caldwell, Idaho-based Community Development Inc., said he wanted most of all to emphasize that he will fight foreclosure if it comes to that because he has a commitment to the residents.

"I'm not going to leave the seniors hanging," he said.

Cornforth said the organization that runs the nonprofit, said in an interview that the land lease gave The Seasons the right to ask for an exemption on property taxes and he has never seen evidence that anyone in his organization promised that it wouldn't.

The nonprofit has, in fact, made an offer to start paying property taxes in three years but it has not got a formal response from the city, he said.

It would be possible for the nonprofit to pay property taxes, he added, if the city hadn't given it the wrong information on a utility charge, which ended up being more than $100,000 than the nonprofit initially expected.

The nonprofit owes about $40,000 in property taxes on land it leases, for $1 a year, from the city for the first of two apartment complexes, a 47-unit building finished in September 2006.

Supervisors agreed that when they negotiated the 2005 land lease they wouldn't have rented the land for nearly free if they would have known The Seasons would have used its nonprofit status to get an exemption on property taxes.

But Scott Scherer, an attorney for the nonprofit, said the lease doesn't specifically say The Seasons couldn't opt out of property taxes. Also, past talks about the issue between the city and the nonprofit look "somewhat ambiguous," he told the board.

Supervisors such as Mayor Marv Teixeira, however, disagreed that the nonprofit didn't at least promise them verbally it would pay property taxes when they asked.

"That was the first question out of my mouth," Teixeira said before leaving the meeting because he was sick.

If the nonprofit wants to argue the contract isn't clear about property tax payments, the city could easily say The Seasons used fraud to get the city to sign the contract, Supervisor Richard Staub added.

The nonprofit is paying property taxes on the land for the second apartment complex, though, Scherer said, and it only opted out of paying property taxes on the first building to deal with its budget. He asked the city for more time to negotiate.

But the city has tried to talk with the nonprofit, said Supervisor Shelly Aldean said, and has been "stonewalled."

"I don't know what we'll accomplish by a delay," she said.

• Contact reporter Dave Frank at dfrank@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212.