Brainerd City Council Plans to Address Vacant Buildings

Multiple Brainerd residents reached out to the City Council recently to report vacant, abandoned buildings. The Brainerd City Council, as well as area homeowners, have noticed a concerning uptick in abandoned buildings the past few years, some of which have considerable fire damage.

“What happens then is the building will turn towards disarray or decay, and what we’re really looking to do is protect the property owners adjacent to those properties by making sure that if we’ve got buildings of that nature, there’s a process for keeping them, at least to a level playing field,” explained Brainerd Mayor Dave Badeaux.

But other abandoned buildings could potentially be restored.

“These vacant buildings typically can be reclamated by contractors, they’re not ones that are complete losses,” said James Kramvik, Brainerd Community Development Director. “So the ones that are complete losses typically would get a condemnable status and kind of are a separate category. These are buildings that are potentially repairable and wanted, and the City Council wanted to see something done with them to make them habitable again.”

However, there are still hurdles the council believes cannot be cleared for the buildings with less damage, as most of them are far too old and fragile to be habitable.

“Part of it could be some of our aging buildings in town,” added Kramvik. “You know we do have a lot of 80- to 100-year-old homes, which could maybe make it more difficult for that homeowner to try to reclamate a project like that, versus something that’s maybe 20 years old.”

The city council is now considering a vacant building registry, which would require owners of those buildings to register the structures with the city for a $7,000 fee, an idea Brainerd Community Development picked up from how Minneapolis handles vacant buildings.

“It’s not going to solve all issues with it, but it is solving some of the issues in Minneapolis with their vacant buildings,” stated Kramvik. “So with that, we got good feedback from them. So we really modeled our ordinance after what Minneapolis was doing to combat their vacant building problem.”

Brainerd City Council members will hold the first reading for the proposed vacant building ordinance at this Monday’s meeting.