Community housing advocates continue to fight for three West Ketchum apartment buildings they feel they rightfully won in a drug-forfeiture auction on Tuesday.

Rebekah Helzel, founder of Advocates for Real Community Housing, placed an auction-high $2.3 million bid to pull off a major coup for affordable housing in the Wood River Valley. Funding for the bid was a joint effort between ARCH and the Blaine-Ketchum Housing Authority, and was widely supported by the Ketchum and Sun Valley city councils.

But officials from the Internal Revenue Service and EG&G Tech Services, the private contractor handling the auction, said they would not sign a contract since the bid was $1.2 million short of the undisclosed minimum purchase price of $3.5 million.

Posted: 10|7|05 at 9:03 am. Filed under: US News.