a. Difficult economic conditions coupled with the continued high rate of foreclosures have significantly increased the number of vacant, abandoned, and other problem properties in the State‘s municipalities, particularly its older cities;

b. The continued presence and proliferation of these vacant, abandoned, and other problem properties in the communities of this State has a negative effect on the public health and welfare, reduces property values and municipal revenues, and impedes the economic development and revitalization of the State’s municipalities, particularly its older cities;

c. At present, many vacant, abandoned and other problem properties, rather than being productively reused, remain vacant despite frequent changes in ownership, and continue to have a blighting effect on their surroundings;

d. The State’s municipalities can benefit from more effective tools to control the inventory of vacant, abandoned, and other problem properties, in order to both minimize the harm that they do in their present condition and to facilitate their restoration to productive use;

e. In order to most effectively engage the local community in identifying problem properties, the State’s municipalities can also benefit from the publication of interactive online mapping databases of vacant and abandoned properties;

f. To ensure that land banking activities are conducted in an honest and open manner, the public can also benefit from the inclusion of properties subject to land banking agreements within the interactive online mapping databases regardless of whether or not such properties are vacant and abandoned;

g. It is in the best interest of this State to allow municipalities to designate single entities to act on their behalf to acquire, maintain, and convey, lease and otherwise dispose of vacant, abandoned and problem properties, in order to carry out strategies to ensure that the reuse of these properties provides the greatest long-term benefit to the physical, social and economic condition of the municipality; and

h. It is, therefore, appropriate to identify land banking, and associated land banking activities, including those involving site improvements and the preparation of property for productive reuse, as a public purpose, and to permit a municipality to provide tax-exempt status to properties for so long as they are held as land bank properties.

L.2019, c.159, s.2.