NONPROFITS’ PROPERTY FEARS
Facility for deaf fears its own lease dispute
Program helping deaf children has an agreement like the one city now contests
By MELANIE MARKLEY
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
The Center Serving Persons with Mental Retardation isn’t the only nonprofit that faces an uncertain future because of a 99-year lease the city now says is invalid.
Next door, the Center for Hearing and Speech shares a building with the Harris County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority on city property leased for 99 years in 1965. The building sits on a prime 3-acre tract at the corner of West Dallas and Shepherd.
Renee Davis, executive director of the center that teaches deaf children to speak without using sign language, said she has not been contacted by the city, but she worries that her facility could face the same scrutiny as the neighboring center for the mentally retarded.
Representatives of the center for the mentally retarded are in ongoing talks with the mayor’s office. The city had threatened to sell the 6 acres that the center leased because the directors would not agree to pay closer to market-value rent for the land near River Oaks.
Mayor Bill White said he hopes the meetings will produce a fair policy that the city also can apply to other nonprofits such as the Center for Hearing and Speech.
White said he wants to develop a uniform policy to reduce the risk of lawsuits against the city claiming the leases are not valid, which could disrupt the nonprofits’ operations.
The Center Serving Persons with Mental Retardation operates a residence hall, a sheltered work site, vocational training and day care for adults with severe mental and physical disabilities.
The Center for Hearing and Speech is a nonresidential education facility.
The two United Way agencies have been operating under long-term leases that require them to provide a certain level of social services in exchange for paying a token $1 in annual rent.
Davis said her lease with the city sets $31,065 annual rent, which is waived if the nonprofit provides at least that much in services to the community.
Davis said her center provides more than $1 million a year in services to at least 1,000 hearing-impaired children. The center is staffed with teachers, audiologists and speech pathologists who help deaf children learn to communicate verbally.
“We believed that this was a partnership with the city,” Davis said. “They would lease the land to us and we would provide very difficult kinds of services that need professional expertise for deaf children, and the taxpayers did not have to bear the burden of providing those very specialized services.”
The MHMRA portion of the building provides intake services, a school for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and a program for adults recovering from mental illness, said Dr. Steven Schnee, executive director of Harris County MHMRA.
“We have what we believe to be a long-term lease relationship where services are provided and guaranteed to be provided,” he said.
But the city has said that the 99-year leases violate a 1905 charter provision that limits such contracts to no more than 30 years, or to 50 years with voter approval.
Bob Christy, the city’s real estate director, said the center for the retarded and the center for the deaf are the only two with 99-year leases although he said several other nonprofits have shorter-term, $1-a-year leases.
The Lighthouse for the Blind, next door to both centers, renegotiated its 99-year lease in 2000. President Gib DuTerroil said the city questioned the validity of the lease when the Lighthouse sought a permit to expand its building.
The Lighthouse and the city agreed to a new 30-year lease. That contract expires in 2030 and allows the Lighthouse to use the 2-acre tract for $1 a year as long as the facility provides services to the blind.
The Center Serving Persons with Mental Retardation, however, has had an ongoing battle with the city that started when its directors tried unsuccessfully to renew a 30-year lease on the acre where its residential hall now stands.
LEASE HISTORY
Background of the city’s arrangement with the Center for Hearing and Speech
1965 – City leases the land for 99 years to the Harris County Society for Crippled Children and Adults.
1969 – School for the Deaf enters the lease as a co-tenant with what by then was the Easter Seals Society for Crippled Children and Adults.
1991 – Harris County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority takes over Easter Seals space.
1995 – School for the Deaf changes its name to the Center for Hearing and Speech.
Source: City of Houston, Center for Hearing and Speech
Link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4724902.html
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