Menards poised to buy overlooked triangle of land in West Duluth lumberyard

It turns out that the city of Duluth is the owner of a tiny triangle-shaped parcel of land located smack-dab in the middle of a Menards lumberyard.

The home improvement center has been squatting on about 130 square feet of city land inside the footprint of its sprawling West Duluth retail operation for more than a decade now, unbeknownst to either company or city officials.

But no longer.

"Because Menards is refinancing, they redid the title work, and that's how they found this," explained Keith Hamre, Duluth's director of planning and construction services.

At a Thursday night agenda session, At Large City Councilor Noah Hobbs asked how the unpurchased property could have escaped notice.

Hamre responded: "When you do title research and there are multiple plats and rearrangements, sometimes little remnant pieces like this get overlooked. Back when the Menards development was done in the early 2000s, that was a time when there was a transition from Mylar plats to more of a digital medium, so this just got overlooked."

Most of the Menards center sits atop property that was formerly home to a Shoppers' City store, but the company also purchased some old right-of-way property the city had acquired from a railroad and for the construction of Wadena Street.

Henry Martinsen, property services supervisor for the city, said a Menards representative contacted him, after discovering the stray parcel of land the company unwittingly had been occupying.

The company is replatting the property occupies in West Duluth to replace the complicated assemblage of parcels it put together for its home center with a single legal description for the collective whole, Martinsen explained.

"It will be a lot cleaner for them," he said. "But going through that process, they realized there was this little triangle-shaped piece of property that they were not the legal owners of. As far as I can tell, my guess is that it was just an oversight when they were acquiring all these properties down there to put together their site, but that was well before my time."

As for the peculiarity of such an oversight, Martinsen said: "That's not so uncommon, especially in a complicated transaction that involved multiple parcels like this. It can be easy to miss one."

Now that the situation has come to light, however, Martinsen said it needs to be set straight.

"For us obviously, it makes sense to sell them that property. So we've started that process," he said.

The Duluth City Council is slated to consider an ordinance authorizing the city to sell the parcel to Menards for the appraised value of the property - $5,100. Monday will mark the first reading of that ordinance, meaning that the soonest the council could approve the transaction would be upon a second reading slated for Feb. 27.

Hamre joked that if the city could sell property by the square foot versus the acre more often, it would certainly benefit financially.