Shelby County commissioners take up a call Monday, Jan. 23, to temporarily stop the selling of tax delinquent properties by the Shelby County Land Bank.

The 90-day moratorium proposed by commissioner Britney Thornton is the latest effort by commissioners questioning land use and property transfers in blighted areas of Memphis.

Thornton is proposing the three-month moratorium to get more information on Land Bank sales including the prices they are sold at and how the properties are advertised for sale.

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“Times are changing and the interest in the urban core has risen,” Thornton said during committee sessions last week. “The value of land across our market has increased. … There are a number of out-of-town investors who continue to enter into this market strategically.”

Thornton said she has heard lots of complaints about Land Bank policies that provide notice of the sales to nonprofits that she says appear to be used selectively. She also pointed to turnover in Land Bank employees and complaints to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by some of those employees.

“I would just like to really make the case that we pause to be able to figure out what is happening within this particular body,” Thornton said.

Commissioner Erika Sugarmon said she is concerned about properties sold through the Land Bank being sold for delinquent taxes that might be well below the appraised value of the property.

“Just because you sell it doesn’t mean that the next year or so there is going to be housing,” she said. “We have to have a fair process and I’m not hearing a fair process.”

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Shelby County Public Works director Cliff Norville, whose division includes the Land Bank, says the calls for some kind of strategy for land use of the real estate is different than what a previous county commission set out as the purpose when the land bank was created.

“It was defined as to acquire, maintain and dispose of property and that was it,” he told commissioners last week.

Most of the properties held by the Land Bank are tax delinquent properties the Trustee’s office put up for auction but couldn’t sell for back taxes and penalties owed on those taxes.

“There is no staff or budget to follow up on investment properties,” Norville said. “Our mission is to dispose of them as quickly as we possibly can and then move on.”

Thornton says the Land Bank may be “selective” in how it disposes of the property.

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“When we have processes that are prohibiting people from local neighborhoods from even just engaging in being able to engage in these processes, I think there is a big problem with that,” she said. “And it really justifies a deeper dive into this particular office.”

Commissioner Amber Mills says she is undecided on a moratorium. In her five years on the commission, Mills says she has seen four Land Bank directors. She also said she wants to hear from all sides on the claims of discrimination by some employees of the office.

The commission meets at 3 p.m. with a closed attorney-client executive session scheduled for 2:30 p.m.

Watch the 3 p.m. meeting via livestream. Here is the agenda. Click on an individual item for documents offering more detail about that item.

Follow @bdriesdm for live coverage of the meeting.

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The commission also takes the first of three votes Monday on amendments to the 13-year old Unified Development Code for Memphis and unincorporated areas of Shelby County.

The amendments are an annual ordinance by the Memphis-Shelby County Division of Planning and Development that are voted on by the commission and the Memphis City Council.

The additions to the code include a “transit overlay” designed to add housing density along the Memphis Area Transit Authority bus rapid transit corridor between Downtown and the University of Memphis.

“Obviously we need density to support rapid transit,” John Zeanah, director of Planning and Development told a commission committee last week. “And rapid transit, in turn, supports density.”

Zeanah also said the overlay could be used in other parts of the city “as we see more frequent transit investments take place over time.”

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The “Innovation Corridor,” which is to start in 2026 or 2027, is to use Poplar and Union avenues as the east-west corridor with the city’s first use of bus-only lanes on Second Street and B.B. King Boulevard at the Downtown end of the corridor.

The higher frequency of buses along the corridor is also aided by changing the streetscape to facilitate the buses making fewer stops at stops that are designed to have more riders at them.

The proposed UDC changes also set some new standards for small scale residential development that allows for smaller lots sizes than the current code does as well as “cottage” development and stacked townhouses in areas already zoned for duplexes.

The annual amendments drew fire last week from Javier Bailey, chief administrator to Shelby County Assessor Melvin Burgess Jr.

Burgess is recommending the County Commission create a task force to make recommendations on real estate uses including mandatory inspections of rental properties every two years at the cost of the owner and a county housing department that has some expanded role in subsidized affordable rental housing.

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In the process, Bailey criticized the proposed UDC amendments.

“It does not address the creation of new housing. It tells you that you need it,” he said “But it doesn’t tell you how to do it or make any recommendation on how to do it.”

Bailey oversaw the Assessor’s office survey of data on all housing in the county rated from “poor” to “unsound” and then broke down the data by County Commission district.

The findings show 5,630 properties in commission District 8, represented by Commission Chairman Mickell Lowery and “almost 3,000” in the adjacent District 7, represented by commissioner Henri Brooks.

“It unquestionably gives rise to the need for a comprehensive housing policy that begins to push this in the other direction,” Bailey said of the numbers from those two districts. “This should be part of this county’s investment.”

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The task force would include real estate professionals with representatives of the Planning and Development Division, the Assessor’s office and the office of the county Trustee.

When Bailey said it could be modeled on a similar effort Burgess backed in Orange Mound, Thornton, who was vice chair of the Orange Mound group before her election to the commission last August, questioned how successful the Orange Mound effort was.