September 9, 2008

Fellow Citizens

As taxpayers in Adams County School District 12, you deserve to have the full set of facts related to the activities surrounding the proposed eminent domain action to take the Auto-trol building by the Adams 12 School District.

Recently the School District announced they will not be taking the Auto-trol property after all, and in the process tried to present itself as following a competent and responsible process.

Unfortunately, the School District has created a huge mess that has cost the local community real dollars for appraisals, engineering inspections, architects, and legal fees. Needless to say they have run off Auto-trol, a 30-year corporate, tax-paying resident. Auto-trol will be moving to a few facility in Westminster.

They created tremendous financial and operational damage to Auto-trol and our tenants (the church and the youth baseball league) Although we have no doubt we will survive this situation (Auto-trol has survived for 46 years, after all!), the stress, cost and wasted time is placing Auto-trol in a seriously dangerous business position. We believe that the damage caused on all fronts is due exclusively to the poor planning and execution by the School District’s leadership. Clearly the Auto-trol property has been in the sights of local government for quite some time so they had plenty of time to plan and do things well. Unfortunately, that is not what happened.

In fact, the costs incurred by both the District and Auto-trol could have been avoided if the School District had simply done the right things prior to filing a motion for taking the property, or even during the inspection period when they could have determined the cost of the renovations they would want to do. For instance, they could have seen their own announced plan to grow towards the north and the claims of "fuel savings" in moving to Auto-trol’s location were contradictory.

Eminent domain cases are complex court processes that give public entities unusual power. We support the law and the concept of eminent domain as a basic tenet of our country’s ability to grow. However, sometimes that power is abused­. Unless the government acts inappropriately, the property owner has almost no rights. In this case, Adams 12 School District tried to aggressively use the law and it didn’t work out for them as they expected. Although the District may have technically followed all the rules, we think they acted inappropriately

Despite what the District may want you to believe, they never attempted to negotiate for a fair outcome. They indicated in meetings many months prior to filing eminent domain that they planned to use this law to avoid negotiating. In fact, Auto-trol wanted the District to have the property. Auto-trol approached the District concerning buying the building when it heard the District might be interested. The company already had plans to sell the building. All that Auto-trol wanted was a fair price for its property. The District made a low-ball offer, gave the company less than 10 days to accept the low offer or they would file for condemnation (eminent domain). These facts are all substantiated with the documents you can find in public filings and letters written by the District regarding this case.

The aggressive timeline of the District’s eminent domain action required Auto-trol to act quickly and make many decisions that it might have done differently if it were not rushed. This cost the company premium dollars due to having to scramble to move fast. The company also lost profits due to having to deal with this distracting issue instead of building business. Notwithstanding these inconveniences, Auto-trol did cooperate at every step of the way because it really had no options under eminent domain law. The District was given total access to the building and grounds. However, the District never took the appropriate time and care to look at the building and determine if it was appropriate for their bus barn facility plan, until they were already deeply into the process.

The School District never expected Auto-trol to make this a public issue and expose their bullying tactics to take the property at an unfairly discounted price. Just look at the letters and filings on the web page and you will see that the District made an offer more than $4 million less than the building was appraised. Then, in the same ridiculously low offer, they wrote, "accept it or we will file for eminent domain".

Then, in announcing its "never mind," Adams 12 claimed the building was not being maintained. That is simply not true. Adams 12 didn’t do its homework and tried to take Auto-trol’s building and land for a price millions of dollars below appraised market value, and then chose to back out in a spiteful and hurtful way by falsely characterizing the building as poorly maintained. We think this was done to distract attention and cover up for the poor planning..

After reviewing the District’s engineering studies that were provided to Auto-trol several days after the district publicly discussed them with the media, it is Auto-trol’s opinion that the school district wanted to do some remodeling and many of the claims about the building being in disrepair are actually about modifications the school district needs to do to meet the building codes required for a publicly owned facility. The District disingenuously represented these as deferred maintenance.

Adams 12 treated a long-time corporate citizen and its employees with total disdain and tried to bully their way through taking Auto-trol’s property at a price way less than what would have been fair. Consequently, they created a costly mess. I am not sure what the mishandling of this process has cost the citizens in terms of real dollars and lost opportunity in the long-range development plans. But I am sure that the financial and business operational impacts on Auto-trol are immense.

Is this any way for the school district to behave? Would you not expect better?

Sincerely,

Danny Stroud
Auto-trol Technology Corp.
Managing Director

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