San Diego’s efforts to win an ongoing legal battle for control of Liberty Station will soon include getting appraisals for 54 separate properties within the sprawling former military base. Appraisals are often a precursor to selling a property, but city officials are actually trying to accomplish just the opposite. They’re getting the appraisals as part of a complex effort to avoid selling Liberty Station to the national property management company that leases much of the mixed-use development. The management company, Seligman Properties, contends the city must offer up the 20-year-old development for sale to the highest bidder because the city has no plans to further develop it. City officials say it’s crucial for the public to retain long-term control and ownership of Liberty Station, which is just east of Point Loma and includes public parks, an arts district, restaurants and shops. They say a sale in the near future would be particularly bad because Seligman has $1-per-year leases on most of Liberty Station that last through the 2050s and 2060s. City officials say those leases make buying Liberty Station a poor investment for any buyer except Seligman, contending a bidding war would be unlikely and Seligman would ultimately get Liberty Station at a substantially deflated purchase price. Seligman filed a lawsuit in 2022 against the city, seeking to force a sale based on state law governing how cities handle properties they acquired from redevelopment agencies after California dissolved those agencies in 2012. San Diego acquired Liberty Station from its redevelopment agency and then formally designated the area a “future development” site instead of a “liquidation” site, which has allowed the city to avoid selling it. In its lawsuit, Seligman says that designation was bogus because redevelopment at Liberty Station “had already been completed and there was no ‘future development’ planned or proposed.” A Sacramento Superior Court judge ruled in October 2023 that the city doesn’t have to put Liberty Station up for sale as long as city officials continue to make meaningful progress on plans to further develop Liberty Station and eight other properties on their “future development” list. That ruling meant that after a decade of making essentially no progress on developing those nine sites, city officials had to spring into action to convince the judge they were making meaningful progress. Two key things the city must do before a former redevelopment-agency site can be developed is get the site independently appraised and then negotiate compensation agreements. The compensation agreements are with all other public agencies, such as the county and local school districts, that would share in the proceeds should the city sell any of the properties to developers. Multiple agencies share the proceeds when former redevelopment agency properties are sold, because redevelopment law forced those agencies to give up tax revenues they would have otherwise received. In the 14 months since the judge’s ruling, the city has gotten appraisals for six of the nine “future development” sites and worked out compensation deals on two of those sites: downtown’s Balboa Theatre and the Skateworld site in Linda Vista. City officials said in court documents filed Dec. 16 that they now plan to pursue appraisals for the last three sites: Liberty Station, the former Walker Scott building at 1014 Fifth Ave. and the Chinese Historical Museum at 404 Third Ave. In November, the city sent to county real estate officials proposed instructions that would be given to an appraiser. City and county officials are scheduled to meet Jan. 5 to review those instructions and negotiate possible revisions. Once city officials have completed appraisals and compensation agreements for all nine “future development” sites, it’s unclear how they will show the judge in the case, Shelleyanne Chang, that they are still making progress. In the city’s long-range property management plan for former redevelopment sites, which was created in 2015, officials provide no details on how Liberty Station could be further developed. High-rise or mid-rise developments are prohibited in the area because of its proximity to San Diego International Airport and its location within the airport’s flight path. And when they were creating that plan, city officials lobbied to have Liberty Station designated a government-use property and then a property that couldn’t be sold or developed because of the long-term leases. When state officials rejected both of those efforts, city officials had only two choices: future development site or liquidation site. City officials chose the former. Seligman has long-term leases on much of the commercial property in Liberty Station. A nonprofit called the NTC Foundation controls the area’s Arts and Culture District. An attorney for Seligman, Bill Ihrke, reiterated the company’s desire to buy Liberty Station in an email last week to The San Diego Union-Tribune. “Seligman Liberty Station is the long-term leaseholder of certain Liberty Station properties owned by the city of San Diego. As such, they share the city of San Diego’s vision of a vibrant and thriving Liberty Station that attracts and benefits the community well into the future,” Ihrke wrote. “Our position is that the best way to achieve that, with the greatest benefit to the city and the community, is through long-term ownership that will ensure continual enhancement as well as ongoing maintenance of these properties,” he added.