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My friend Hal Walter has had his property listed for a while, and despite what you may have heard about a hot market in mountain real-estate, he's yet to receive an offer for his 35-acre donkey ranch above Westcliffe.
Maybe he's asking too much -- about $300,000, he told me -- and the fact is, there are better deals on mountain property.
Consider another parcel: 640 acres of mountain land, mostly forested, and only five miles from a federal highway. Little Cochetopa Creek runs across one corner. A natural gas line crosses the parcel. Electricity and telephone lines are less than a mile away, and there's a county road.
The last parcel to sell in that valley went for $12,500 an acre. The county assessor has appraised other nearby parcels -- just their land, not including buildings or other improvements -- at from $3,000 to $12,000 an acre.
So, how much should this 640-acre parcel sell for? There is a developer with whom I am on speaking terms, and he said $5,000 to $10,000 per acre would be in the ballpark these days.
How about $1,560 an acre? If you owned that 640 acres, would you sell it for $1,560 an acre when nearby land is going for eight times that much?
If you live in Colorado, you do own that land, and if all goes as proposed, that's how much you're going to get for that land.
It's a school section,
and it's a legacy of one
of the nobler acts of the federal government. It starts
with the government surveyors, who divided the West into
townships,
which are big squares with six-mile-long
sides.
Each township was divided into 36 sections, each a mile square, and each section got a number from 1 to 36. When Colorado became a state in 1876, the federal government gave sections 16 and 36 of each township, if available, to the state for the support of public schools.
Thus they're known as school sections,
and
they're among the lands managed by the Colorado Board of
Land Commissioners, also known as the State Land Board.
The land board is considering a trade: the Little Cochetopa school section in Chaffee County for a 3,080-acre ranch in Conejos County near La Jara Reservoir, owned by one Thomas Smith of Kansas City, Mo.
That may look like a good deal on the surface. According to the appraisals, the La Jara land is worth about $1.2 million. And, according to the appraisals submitted to the state land board, the Little Cochetopa school section is worth $998,000, or $1,560 per acre.
So by a form of math known as State Land Board Appraisal Arithmetic, the state is coming out $200,000 ahead on this deal, and it's getting 3,080 acres for 640.
Except that the land board is selling your land and mine for $1,560 an acre when nearby land is going for more than $10,000 an acre. Thus the school section might fetch $6.4 million or even more, but the land board acts as though it's worth only $996,000.
Such deals are one result of Amendment 15, passed in 1996 with the support of many environmental organizations. Under the old law, the land board was obligated to get maximum return, and couldn't consider matters like preserving open space or protecting wildlife habitat. And if the board sold land to private parties, it had to be at public auction.
Do you think this section of attractive mountain property would fetch only $1,560 an acre at a public auction? Or do you think somebody is now getting a hell of a good deal, at your expense and mine?
Personally, I'd prefer that the Little Cochetopa school section stayed in public hands and out of the reach of developers. A study just completed in Custer County shows that such rural developments do raise the tax base, but even so, they typically cost local governments $1.16 in services for every $1 they fetch in taxes. I'd rather send my subsidies elsewhere.
But if the land must be transferred to private hands and then carved into 35-acre ranchettes, it should fetch a fair price, and in the current market, that's considerably more than $1,560 an acre.
The comment period for the Little Cochetopa land trade extends into June, and written comments are welcome before the board makes its decision then. So there's some time to write to the Land Commissioners at 1313 Sherman St. Room 620, Denver CO 80203.
You might tell them you want your money's worth when they're selling your property, especially when the money goes to a fund to support Colorado schools.
Or you might ask where you can find similar good deals on scenic mountain real estate, because I'm pretty sure that Hal will never give you such a good deal on his land.
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