After more than five years of talking, the city has a land bank.

“It’s good to see it get across the finish line,” said Mayor Matt Pacifico, the primary advocate for creation of the agency, after City Council adopted an ordinance at a recent meeting designating the Redevelopment Authority as the city’s land bank.

A land bank can help prevent or eliminate blight by intercepting properties headed for judicial tax sale before they’re available at open auction, where they’re susceptible to purchase by irresponsible or incapable buyers who sometimes let them sit and deteriorate further, officials have said.

After acquiring properties, land banks can then direct them to responsible parties who can return those properties to productive use.

“A land bank is a proven tool for local governments to systematically remove problem properties from an endless cycle of vacancy, abandonment and tax foreclosure,” the ordinance states.

“A lot of eyes will be watching us,” to see how the new agency performs, Pacifico said.

The next steps will be to get Blair County and the Altoona Area School District — the other property taxing bodies involved — to sign memorandums of understanding that pledge cooperation, Pacifico said.

Those governments have previously indicated their willingness, Pacifico has said.

The law allows land banks to take 50 percent of taxes generated by properties it conveys to developers for five years — which the other taxing bodies might find objectionable, except that without such conveyances, those properties would likely generate no tax revenues at all.

The tax revenues that flow to land banks, along with revenues from the sale of conveyed properties, fund land bank operations.

The city will try to obtain blanket permission from those other taxing bodies to proceed with acquisitions whenever they make sense, to avoid the need to obtain permission for every property individually, which would be cumbersome.

The land bank will get its first opportunity to put its powers into practice in June, at the next judicial sale, Pacifico said.

The ordinance takes advantage of a recent change in state law that allows municipalities to designate their redevelopment authorities as land banks, to minimize staffing requirements.