PROVO — Mayor Lewis Billings has walked away from nearly $2 million in potential Provo real estate profits "to avoid even the appearance of impropriety," he said Wednesday in a memo he delivered personally to the Deseret Morning News bureau in Orem.

A story in Tuesday's edition of the newspaper reported that Billings owns 10.85 acres in the old Ironton section of Provo, now part of the area where the city is preparing to sell the first commercial property in the Mountain Vista Business Center.

That information surprised Provo City Council Chairman George Stewart and City Councilman Steve Turley when the Deseret Morning News contacted them on Friday to ask if it was common knowledge on the council that Billings still owned land in the business park.

Each said they thought the mayor had liquidated the land. Stewart said Billings should have revealed the potential conflict of interest before the vote, but Stewart and Turley said they wouldn't have changed sides when the council gave unanimous approval of the city's sale of the first 10 acres in the business park to Action Target for $110,000 per acre.

"It didn't affect my vote," Stewart said, "but you like full disclosure, knowing all you can know, when you make a decision like this. The mayor might have felt like that happened, but with the current council, it has never been disclosed."

Other City Council members said they didn't know, either, or knew years ago but forgot about the mayor's interest in Ironton at the time of the Action Target vote.

In his memo, Billings expressed frustration that members of the City Council would suggest he failed to disclose the information. Billings also attached several documents to the three-page letter:

• Copies of 11 newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor from 1997 and 1998, showing that his pending sale of 149 acres to the city was scrutinized during his first campaign for mayor and first year in office.

• The disclosure forms Billings filed with the city last month and in 1997, when he was a city employee.

• A 1999 City Council resolution that requested Billings, then the mayor, work on the development of the Ironton property despite his potential conflict.

That resolution led to the completion of the sale of 139 acres by the mayor to the city at what his memo called "a deeply discounted price." The deal began in 1992, when he granted Provo an option to buy the property. The City Council waited seven years to exercise the option. When it did, it got a steal, according to Billings' attorney, Richard Hill, getting the land at $3,000 an acre.

The reason for the discount was soil contamination. In his memo, Billings said it was clear a government entity had the best chance of bringing together all the parties necessary to clean up the site of a former steel mill.