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03/10/2020 03:30 PMThe Board of Selectmen (BOS) has officially recommended the terms of a new lease with Our Lady of Mercy Preparatory Academy (OLMPA) for the Island Avenue school building. If approved at Town Meeting, the lease would commit the private school for a minimum of another year at a rate of $400,000 (it’s currently paying $535,000), with the opportunity to renew at the reduced price.
Following negotiations that stretched on for around three months, including eight executive sessions of the BOS purely for that purpose, First Selectman Peggy Lyons and other BOS members said they were hoping to finally have some short-term clarity while the town looks for a long-term use or sale of the building.
The lease will be reviewed by the Board of Finance, and must be approved by Town Meeting on Thursday, April 2. The BOS additionally scheduled a public hearing on the lease for Monday, March 30.
The lease would run through July 31, 2021. If interested, OLMPA would have to request a second renewal by Nov. 30, 2020, which the BOS would have to approve.
Lyons said the only reason the BOS would approve another year’s lease would be if the town still had no strong ideas or prospects for the Island building.
OLMPA, a private, Catholic-based K-8 school, was approved in October 2018 for a one year, non-renewable lease $535,000 lease after Island was closed by the town due to declining enrollment. The town named an ad-hoc committee last month to find the best possible long-term solution for the school building, whether it was a sale, town use, or a school like OLMPA.
That committee is charged with “consider[ing] and recommend[ing] possible uses for and/or disposition of the Island Avenue School Building and associated land. Such use may include municipal use, sale, or lease of all or portion of the building or land.”
It is required to deliver its recommendations by June of this year.
OLMPA Chair John Picard has previously said that the school would like to purchase the building.
Lyons said in a statement at the March 9 BOS meeting, where the draft lease was unanimously approved to be sent onto town meeting, that she felt the lease was a step in the right direction and avoided putting the town in the situation of having an another unused property on its hands.
“We’ve seen with our experience with Academy School—something that has sat vacant and deteriorated over the last 15 years—the town has not been good at making decisions when it comes to closed school buildings,” she said. “[OLMPA is] willing to wait while we as a community figure out what we want to happen with this valuable asset.”
Though the 2018 lease explicitly disallowed a renewal, Lyons emphasized to The Source that this new agreement is a modification; it essentially strikes those requirements from the old lease while maintaining much of its provisions.
The new agreement states that “except as amended by the terms herein, all the terms covenants and conditions of the [original lease] shall remain in full force and effect and are ratified and confirmed.”
The new lease also changes the town’s liability as far as the Island building, explicitly making OLMPA responsible for maintenance and repair of the HVAC system. Previously, the town had been responsible for those issues, according to town officials.
OLMPA is also required to allow the town to show Island to “any prospective tenant, mortgagee, or purchaser” with 72 hours of prior notice, according to the lease.
Lyons told The Source she understood from the beginning that OLMPA was never going to be able to afford the $535,000 price in the long term, but that having the stability of a revenue source was much preferred to kicking OLMPA out this summer without any real clarity on the future of the building.
“They were willing to go in for one year, with the understanding that they were not going to be able to sustain that long term,” she said. “And so I think we got to a point that...we had to make a decision. I wish that they had signed a two-year lease last year. It would have been a higher price. The longer we delay these things, frankly, the more negotiating clout you’re giving to the existing tenant.”
Other members of the BOS supported the decision. Selectman Bruce Wilson offered an endorsement that the lease was “the best deal that could be negotiated.”
“It’s now up to the community to tell us what you want,” Wilson said at the meeting.
“I feel like we came to a good compromise,” Lyons told The Source. “I think the [BOS] was comfortable with the compromise. Hopefully the public will be comfortable with the compromise.”
Details on meeting times and places were unavailable at press time.