SID sold neighborhood park to school disctrict for $1

[Trips1]

A little background, in 2011 Celebrity Homes formed the neighborhood Whitetail Creek in Sarpy County. This included what would become ~300 homes, 4.85 acre park with a Gretna Elementary School next to it. For the park the SID paid $150,000+ for improvements and let the school used it for recess. The neighborhood was marketed and sold as having a park and the SID paid taxes on this property.

Earlier this year when sidewalks were being finished up the park required 500 feet of the 3,000 feet project. In return for for the School District paying for the 500 feet of sidewalk, the SID sold the 4.85 acres to the school district for $1.

Has anyone heard of any neighborhoods doing this? With Gretna Public Schools paying $50k/acre across the street for farm land I would think this park would have some value.

[Bomaha]

I thought for tax purposes (or something like that) a public park, regardless of the municipal entity that owns it, cannot be sold for anything like a market value. I could be completely wrong and sound like I put a bunch of big words together to sound well-versed.

[Trips1]

I thought for tax purposes (or something like that) a public park, regardless of the municipal entity that owns it, cannot be sold for anything like a market value. I could be completely wrong and sound like I put a bunch of big words together to sound well-versed.

That could be as the assessed value was $2,500.

The story in the OWH today is a good example. UNO wanted to create a parking lot in Elmwood Park and Rachel Gallagher sued to protect the park and won. I can't recall a city gifting a stadium or anything like this to a school.

[Original]

I am also not an expert, but have observed SID/HOA public/private entity things for a bit.

Some thoughts - a) an SID is not a city so rules for what they can and cannot do are different as I understand it, essentially an SID is a for-profit enterprise, not a municipality and so has different restrictions and freedoms than a city b) this may have been a strategic goal of the SID from the start, to use the park as a marketing tool and then move it [and the non-trivial on-going maintenance costs] to the school district, and c) I doubt that in practice it changes much about access to the park and may improve maintenance of the park as the SID begins to wind down (after 10 years, it probably is beginning to).

However, a better place to get info about what has happened is the Sarpy SID Lookup, https://apps.sarpy.gov/sidslookup/ Whitetail is 291, and there is contact info and documents there. Looks like a public meeting for the SID board is happening soon :
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that a meeting of the Board of Trustees of Sanitary and Improvement District No.
291 of Sarpy County, Nebraska will be held at 11:30 a.m. on June 22, 2022, at 11440 West Center Road, Suite
C, Omaha, Nebraska, which meeting will be open to the public.

I

[Brad]

an SID is not a city so rules for what they can and cannot do are different as I understand it, essentially an SID is a for-profit enterprise, not a municipality and so has different restrictions and freedoms than a city

This statement is completely wrong. They are absolutely run like a city and not a for-profit enterprise. They have a SID board made up of residents that acts like a city council, SID Financial Agent who handles all the money, and an SID Engineer which manages the SID maintenance and improvements. The only "For Profit" part is when the Developer sells the lots. The SID sells bonds to pay for things and collects taxes to pay off the bonds.

[Original]

OK. let me rephrase see if I just didn't express myself well or am way off (NB, total lay person wanting to understand)

The SID is not a municipality in the legal sense, but a separate kind of legal entity, which has different rules and restrictions around what it can and cannot do. The creation of an SID is frequently spurred by a for-profit enterprise. SIDs are often used as a vehicle to finance creation of roads and sewers via bond issuance, and then have the residents pay back the bonds over an extended period of time. In similar constructs in other states, the trustees do not have to be residents or may not necessarily be elected, but I was pleased to find (when actually looking into in for 3 minutes instead of just shooting off my mouth) that in Nebraska the trustees do have to be elected residents.

My comment on the for-profit was around the idea that SIDs often can be perceived to be run by the professionals contracted to serve in roles such as attorney, accountant, and engineer, and not the residents. (at least, talking to the longer term residents of the area where I live that was an SID until the mid 2010s, and to friends who live in similar things in other states) So maybe the SID is not run like a for-profit business, but it is not also run with the more transparent accountability that one might see in a formal municipality.

The one item that I am not clear on and don't care to actually research is the tax remittance structure (do residents pay taxes to the SID or to the county who then redistributes them to the SID)

Note also as I post this that I am not a big fan of the philosophy around modern suburban development and SIDs, which often seems to leave a patch work of neighborhood designs, street plans, homogeneous blobs, and less accountable management, rather than harmonized streets, diverse neighborhoods, and more easily accountable governance.

[Brad]

There's more guidelines than one might see. The city that will eventually annex them has a lot of say on just about everything in the SID. Also, in Omaha, just about everything is already mapped out in a future land use plan.

As far as transparency, all meetings should be open to the public.

Theses days, the road network is what it is. The City or NDOT tell you where you can tie in to the main streets. The NRD has rules about any waterways that run through the property, how and where you can cross them. Any wetlands need to be carved out of the useable area. Basically take what's left and try to make the most efficient road network that also will adhere to ADA standards.

[Original]

Right, meetings open to the public, but unless I am just not finding statutes correctly (again, not actually wanting to spend time researching, natch), Freedom of Information Act, for example, don't apply to the work the agents (like engineers, attorneys, etc) do. It also seems a clear picture of privatizing, finance-driven, future-binding systems that the U.S. operates under that are leading to an over-extended infrastructure with too many fixed costs and too much deferred maintenance. I would also note that I am not alleging intentional ethical corruption or incompetence on the part of these agents, but more systemic deficiencies in the way their work is structured.

Put yet another way, I maybe understand why we allow SIDs instead of municipalities, and SIDs may have been a good solution 50-60 years ago to some issues that developers were having, but I think that municipalities offer the opportunity for a more civic-minded community, geared toward transparency, accountability, and sustainability, than SIDs do.