As part of its ongoing efforts to clean up a number of areas of town, the Tracy City Council on Monday approved the purchase of a parcel of land near the downtown area.
The land in question, home to a vacated trailer house, is located on the south side of South St. at the intersection with 2nd St. and has for decades been an eyesore in that area.
“The owner wants to basically give it to the City,” Tracy City Administrator Jeff Carpenter told the council. “He’s asking for $2,000, plus closing costs and taxes, so we’re looking at $2,600$2,700. We can probably take care of that trailer on its own.” Carpenter said the hope is to have that area cleaned up by Labor Day.
'I think we'd get a lot of positive feedback by having that gone,' he said of the trailer house and other items on that piece of land. 'This has been an eyesore for years, and we have the opportunity to take care of that right now.'
Council member Dave Tiegs asked if there might be any underground 'surprises' the City might encounter.
'We're not looking at anything that's there that will need to be cleaned (underground),' Carpenter said. 'We're not going to do anything there; we're going to store snow there in the wintertime. There wasn't a gas station or anything there.'
City Attorney Matthew Gross said he will check with the MPCA to ensure that the land was not affected by any nearby businesses in the past.
Carpenter said a lot of the blight behind the trailer house has been removed already. The City will attain the title for the trailer house, but it's not clear what it will do with it. The City will also be responsible for the 50-foot semi trailer that sits on the south edge of the land.
The City has been especially active this year in razing dilapidated houses, already having taken down four houses and two garages in 2025. The City had budgeted $50,000 for 2025 for cleanup efforts; a little more than $19,000 of it has been spent.
'A few of the (houses) that were torn down ... the ones that we went after right away were taken care of by the homeowners,' said Carpenter. 'We've got two more on the docket right now. The town is looking nice right now, it really is.'
Council member George Landuyt made the motion for the City to buy the land; it was seconded by council member Seth Schmidt.
In other news from Monday ...
• The council passed a resolution authorizing the City to execute a Minnesota Department of Transportation grant agreement for improvements at the Tracy Municipal Airport — $108,000.00 (95%) is federallycommitted, and $2,842.13 (2.5%) will come from the State with a match from the City. The project includes funding for the 4-unit hangar. A motion for the grant was made by Tiegs and seconded by council member Jan Arvizu.
• A task order for the final design, bidding and construction of the SCADA system was approved by the council. The system will be implemented in late fall or early winter this year. Tiegs motioned for the approval of the task order and Arvizu seconded. 'The benefit for the public is the water and sewer system will continue to operate,' said Public Works Director Shane Daniels. 'We've been relying every day on very old infrastructure. The log will also monitor our sewer ponds better; if we get a heavy rain event, it will notify us in more real time instead of having us guess when we think it might be going up.'
Daniels said the old system was put into service in 1990; part of the system was replaced in 2006.
The current backwash system has been completely dead since 2020, Daniels said, meaning the City has had to manually backwash daily.
'That takes one guy about an hour-and-a-quarter, four times a week,' he said.
